[pmwiki-users] improved markup for floating images...?
Patrick R. Michaud
pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Jul 28 11:44:44 CDT 2005
On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 11:49:27AM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> What would the downside of using more explicit markup be?
>
> For example: %rframe% Attach:image.gif alt="text" caption="My Caption"
>
> I realize that there may be problems parsing this, but to my human eyes,
> the notation seems more obvious than the proposed rule: "enclose alt text
> in quotes and put captions after a vertical bar as the last thing on the
> line".
Enclose alt-text in quotes isn't a proposed rule, it's an existing one. :-)
I think it's important to note that HTML 4 doesn't have any special
constructs for image captions, thus what we're calling a "caption" here
is really just "anything that appears below the image but within the
same frame". " In fact, with
%rframe% Attach:image.gif | caption
the vertical brace is doing nothing more than generating a <br /> tag
in the output. It's also important to note that a caption isn't (or
shouldn't be) limited to simple text, it can have its own styling,
links, and even images within the caption itself.
%rframe% Attach:cover.gif"cover image" | The Book \
of Wiki [[Attach:book.pdf | Attach:pdf-icon.png"PDF" ]]
> The fact that the proposed notation is more compact is not lost on me, but
> how often will most authors use this notation? I suspect, not very often
> compared to other markup, and they will have to look up the rules every
> time. [...] I hope we aren't losing sight of PmWiki goal number 1, which
> is "favor writers over readers".
Well, in the case of alt= I think that the shortcut form helps far
more than it hurts. But that may be just me. A traditional issue
with HTML was getting authors to place alt= attributes in all image tags
(it's a required attribute), and, at least for me, the repeated
typing of the alt= and quotes was irritating. Having a convenient
shortcut to adding the alt= attribute is a big help to me as a writer,
and one that I would use exclusively over any available longer
alt="..." syntax.
The other concern I have with an explicit alt= and caption= syntax is
that they look a little too much like wikistyles, which means that
authors are likely to try to enclose them in %'s and write things like:
Attach:image.gif %alt="alt text" caption="My Book"%
That said, it's a very interesting idea. If we were to extend
to allow this, would we necessarily stop at images? In other
words, would we also allow the following...?
[[http://www.pmwiki.org/ title="PmWiki" target="_blank" | PmWiki]]
This starts to feel a little slippery to me. It's certainly doable --
we could get the various link parsers to start grabbing any
value=variable looking things that immediately follow... but I'm not
entirely comfortable with it yet.
> Plus, if a new author attempts to edit a page that has this notation
> on it, they will probably need to toggle back and forth between the display
> and edit view to figure out what it does.
I actually think new authors will be able to grok the new syntax
just fine... but if I'm wrong there's very little preventing us from
adding a new-and-improved syntax for it later. :-)
Pm
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