[pmwiki-users] Permissions conundrum, section behaviour

[Patrick R. Michaud]

I'll have to read/digest the overall concept a bit further, but
just to answer a couple of quick points...

On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 01:22:23AM -0400, Henrik Bechmann wrote:
> 1. The comment.
> 
> The directive (the name and parameters for which I choose arbitrarily -- 
> it's another discussion) is placed on the page, say (:comments:), 
> causing comments to be added:
> 
> First comment on a page:
> 
> [[#comment]]
> first comment text
> [[#commentend]]
> 
> Second comment on a page:
> 
> [[#comment]]
> second comment text
> [[#commentend]]
> 
> Right away we have broken the HTML rule to have unique anchor names. So...

...Only because you keep insisting that [[#comment]] is exactly the
same as an "HTML anchor".   It is not.  Only the *first* such marker in
a page generates an HTML anchor -- subsequent repeated instances
of the same marker do not generate an HTML anchor, and thus do
not break the "HTML rule to have unique anchor names."

> [[#comment2]]
> second comment text
> [[#commentend2]]
> 
> Where does the ordinal suffix come from? Surely not from the user (it is 
> logically arbitrary and unnecessary -- an imposition on the user). 

Please hold on to that thought for a moment... I have an answer --
but first:

> With a delimiter:
> 
> First comment on a page:
> 
> [!textblock comment!]
> first comment text
> [!textblockend!]
> 
> Second comment on a page:
> 
> [!textblock comment!]
> second comment text
> [!textblockend!]
> 
> No problems! And simple! And clear!

And exactly what we can do with [[#comment]]/[[#end]] now!


> If an identifier is required (say by some recipe):
> 
> (:comments numbered:)
> 
> First comment on a page:
> 
> [!textblock comment 1!]
> first comment text
> [!textblockend!]
> 
> Second comment on a page:
> 
> [!textblock comment 2!]
> second comment text
> [!textblockend!]

And to return to the earlier comment:  
    "Where does that ordinal index come from?  Surely not from the user...."

Whatever is inserting the ordinal indexes in the [!textblock ...!]
scheme above can just as easily be generating unique 
[[#comment_nnn]] markers instead.  (Actually, it's slightly easier
to use [[#comment_nnn]] instead.)

> If further information was required by a recipe:
> 
> (:comments customcomment:)
> 
> [!textblock customcomment 1 time=10/5/06-12:46a author="Henrik Bechmann" 
> pwd="132kljqdfpoasf21324;lkaf"!]
> first comment text
> [!textblockend!]

[[#customcomment_1 time=20061005T0046 author="Henrik Bechman" ...]]
first comment text
[[#end]]

> Lastly, a couple of personal remarks: First, my apologies for the length 
> of this email. I felt some duty to make this case while you were still 
> in beta. Second, I hope you understand that I make this submission with 
> the greatest of respect for you, and the greatest admiration and 
> affection for your product, PmWiki.

Thanks, I definitely take your comments in the spirit intended,
and mine are intended in the same vein.  Your comments are very 
helpful and valuable and I hope that the terseness of my responses 
above won't be taken as a sign of disrespect or unappreciativeness, 
because they aren't at all intended that way.  I really will need a 
bit of time to absorb what you've written before I can make more 
reasoned responses, but I did want to get some quick observations 
about how I see [!textblock comment!] and [[#comment]] as really
being equivalent.

In fact, I think I can _prove_ that they're equivalent by noting
that a simple pattern replacement is completely sufficient to turn 
one scheme into the other (and vice-versa):

    ## [!textblock comment args!] --> [[#comment args]]
    $y = preg_replace('/\\[!textblock (.*?)!\\]/', '[[#$1]]', $x);

    ## [[#comment args]] --> [!textblock comment args!]
    $x = preg_replace('/\\[\\[#(.*?)\\]\\]/', '[!textblock $1!]', $y);

In other words, I'm saying that '[[#' is simply another 
(much shorter) way of writing what you have for '[!textblock', 
and that also has the mnemonic advantage of associating 
sections of text with url fragments.

Pm