[pmwiki-users] floating box on the right
Patrick R. Michaud
pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Mar 25 12:37:11 CST 2005
On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 07:39:43AM -0800, dan mcmullen wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 03:54:01PM +1100, Nathan Jones wrote:
> >>Have you decided on shorthand syntax yet?
> >>The >>class<<, >>#id<< and >><< (end) option is nice.
> >
> >So far these are the leading candidates.
>
> i'm a bit concerned that '<' & '>' are also used so prominently in
> html/xml. i imagine i will be doing a few double takes, particularly as
> this usage inverts the way html/xml brackets things. also, this would be
> the only 'begin-end' markup in PmWiki which does not have a visual symmetry
> that reflects that behavior.
One reason why I've avoided the use of '<' and '>' in any markup is
to avoid any confusion with XML. However, I've been thinking that
>>...<< is visually distinctive enough from <...> that it's not
likely to cause any real difficulty or confusion. Plus, it has to
always occur at the beginning of a line (and probably on a line by
itself) to have the intended meaning.
Also, note that this would not be the only 'begin-end' markup in PmWiki
without visual symmetry: %% (wikistyles) is used as a begin-end markup
w/o symmetry, and depending on what is meant by "visual symmetry", so
are '', ''', and @@.
But I'm not fully committed to >>...<< as a div markup yet -- it's just
the leading candidate at the moment. I'm still very open to alternatives
(and see the thread starting at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/10363 for the discussion that ultimately led to >>...<<).
Observations from that thread:
- Several people remarked that they didn't understand the discussion
or purpose of <div> markups until they saw the example using >>...<<,
at which point it made sense and garnered lots of support.
- The visual representation of the markup needs to somehow resemble a
"horizontal separator" of some sort, since it is dividing the markup
into (generally vertical) blocks. By analogy, the ||...|| markup
tends to divide things into horizontal blocks.
- Other markups that have been considered
==class== ... ====
====%class% ... ====
= too often used for other things in other markup languages
conflicts with PmWiki 1 ='s convention
/class/ ... //
too confusing with other uses of / (especially filenames and urls)
~~class ... ~~
tildes unavailable on some keyboards
§§class ... §§
§ unavailable on US keyboards
%class% ... %%
conflicts with inline wikistyles, hard to differentiate
[%class%] ... [%%]
hard to type on some keyboards, also poor analogy to [=...=]
[%class% ... %%]
hard to type on some keyboards
|%class ... |%
wrong mnemonic -- '|' is a horizontal separator, not a vertical one
Thus, if we're to use something besides >>...<< we need a suitable
alternative.
Pm
More information about the pmwiki-users
mailing list