[pmwiki-users] Input recipe
Joachim Durchholz
jo at durchholz.org
Fri Jun 24 12:00:48 CDT 2005
Martin Fick wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 09:23:47AM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>
>>Martin Fick wrote:
>>
>>> No I don't know what all the need for forms are, but I do
>>> envision quite a few myself.
>>
>> Could you list a few? It might help us expand our vision of form
>> usage, and that's definitely a Good Thing.
>
> Sure thing mate! :)
Thanks for the input :-)
I do think that in most cases, it's just the admin who's supposed to
edit a form page, though there are exceptions:
> -Tabular data editing where any row can be edited as a separate form.
> This could even mean editing a DB! [...] the front end can adapt to
> how the users think best fit.
(I read that as "users can adapt the forms to their taste", though it's
not what was meant originally - but it's surely an interesting application.)
> -Create a form that adds pages to trails so that a user
> does not need to understand bulleted lists to edit a
> trail.
Not a good idea IMHO. One of the things that makes wiki trails useful is
that you can have trail info and running commentary intermixed;
"formalising" that into a form page would destroy that functionality.
> -Create a form that breaks a page into multiple sections
> that each get edited in a sepearate input box. Think of a
> page describing a photo with a title section, a
> description section, a categories section, a rating
> section...
>
> -New page templates, like above.
Been thinking about that :-)
Still in the administrator domain.
("Administrator domain" has two consequences: (1) it's just a single
person who's supposed to learn and type that markup syntax; (2) the
markup is written or modified very rarely, so the case for easy syntax
isn't very strong - better keep those simple syntaxes for other features.)
> -Quizes with each persons answers filling out a separate
> page or being emailed somewhere.
Hmm... users designing quizzes... with the ability to place the input
area anywhere on the page... interesting idea.
> This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm just an
> uncreative software engineer ;), don't underestimate what
> others could think of still!
I'm in the same category ;-)
> Some of these cases could be serviced by very simple safe
> backends that would support the creation of an unlimited
> amount of forms.
I think there are two cases:
1) the backend stuff you mention above. If I understood you correctly,
that would be defining another markup that generates the appropriate
(:input...:) markup, which would then be further translated to the
appropriate HTML code.
If you really insist on doing the --...-- markup, you could do even do
that - PmWiki is flexible enough that you can define your own markup :-)
2) One-shot forms ("administrative" ones). Syntax is of secondary
importance, giving access to as many useful capabilities of HTML as
possible is more relevant.
Maybe there's a third case that makes forms something that everybody
should setup by himself; I dunno - but here's your opportunity to
describe an example :-)
Regards,
Jo
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