[pmwiki-users] What the @!$&? is that?

Pico pmwiki at ben-amotz.com
Sat May 6 18:14:22 CDT 2006


Joachim Durchholz wrote:
(snip)
> (Once the MarkupCharacters page is good enough, it might be a good idea 
> to link it from the editing hints below the edit input field.)
> 
> Instead of explaining the markup in the MarkupCharacters (and 
> duplicating all the explanations elsewhere), we should insert links to 
> the pages that explain the markup. The MarkupCharacters page would then 
> really be just an index, nothing more. (Maybe rename the page to 
> MarkupIndex?)
> 

At first I thought I didn't like that idea, because the editing hints 
seem so busy already, but one link wouldn't hurt...


But that got me thinking about:

Doing something more with source action

Source action is a great tool that could be expanded upon and promoted 
as yet another way to explore and learn more about PmWiki.

1. Markup hints

One thing that could probably be done without too much trouble would be 
to display a condensed version of MarkupCharacters (2-4 lines) that 
displays characters that link to the relevant documentation page. 
Perhaps this could be accomplished by having the source be displayed 
withing some sort of a frame, or...

2. Markup phrase translation links

A more ambitious idea would be to supercharge the ?action=source to 
display markup characters as links, where the underlying source markup 
characters would display, but those characters would be links to 
documentation pages.  This may not work, but here is one way I thought 
that it could be implemented:  use a special phrase translations page, 
like the internationalizations XL page, that was only used by 
?action=source to translate specified sequences of markup characters 
into a link to a documentation page, like this:

'<<|' => 'WikiTrails',

PmWiki would then replace <<| in the source display <<| as the alias for 
a link that pointed to WikiTrails

If we get even more ambitious, the ?action=source could also supply a 
bit of javascript to support mouseover and could use the translated 
documentation page, e.g. WikiTrails, as the on mouseover text.  Or, 
perhaps even better, allow the phrase translation page to include a 
separate field or item for the mouseover text.

Pico





More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list