[pmwiki-users] Announce: Slender, pmwiki-based wiki making a fresh start

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Jan 18 14:59:19 CST 2007


On 1/18/07, J. Meijer <commentgg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> For those with confidence in PmWiki but unhappy with its syntax.
> Or those out of breath configuring it.
>
> Refer to http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/W7/Slender
>
> A proposal open for discussion.

I'm glad to see the proposal, but I have a few comments on some
of the items written in the proposal, as well as things written
on the W7/W7 page.    My comments are longer than I think can
reasonably fit on the Slender-Discussion page, so I'm posting them
here.

"Pm is generally unreceptive to syntax issues.":  I can see how
people might feel this way, but I'm not sure that it's a fair
comment.  Part of the point, power, and design of PmWiki is
to make it possible to create their own syntax.  The fact that
a proposed new or changed syntax doesn't make it into the core
doesn't mean that it can't be supported via recipes or on the
mailing list.  In many cases it simply means that the time/energy
resources available mean that *I* can't support it.

Note that PmWiki has been explicitly designed to make it easier 
for someone to completely replace the core markup syntax with 
alternates.  Simply setting $EnableStdMarkup = 0; disables the
loading of scripts/stdmarkup.php, and then a recipe or admin
can define a totally new sequence of markup rules, if desired.
As far as I know, very few people have wanted to do this -- I
suspect because the effort involved hasn't been worth the benefit.
(Or perhaps there's something in the core that prevents it, but if
this is the case let me know so I can remove the barriers.)
But in no way am I against having alternate syntaxes -- the defaults
are simply those that I've committed to supporting with the
resources available to me.

"Who uses [[<<]] and why?":  I've remarked many times that [[<<]]
is ugly and I'd love to replace it with something better, but
haven't come up with anything.  I'm definitely open to proposals.  
The primary purpose of [[<<]] is to be able to invoke a
"clear=all" to move content below any floating items.  If we get
rid of [[<<]], we almost certainly need something to replace it.

"Text indented with spaces no longer generates preformatted text.":
I've already remarked that it will be easy to disable this
sometime in 2.2.0-beta, I just haven't had a chance to implement
it yet.  I'm not entirely against having leading-spaces-preformat
disabled by default (instead of enabled as it is now), such that 
it's a local customization option, but my reading of past 
discussions on this topic has been that there are roughly equal 
numbers of people on either side of the issue.

The other note that indented text connects to previous indents
is of course already implemented in PmWiki.

"Header syntax changes to use a single ! to indicate a normal
H3 sized header.":  As given by W3C's WAI guidelines, if <h1>
is used for a page's title then "normal" headings really 
ought to be at the <h2> level.  We could ore say that a single 
! should produce an <h2>, but I think that the doubled markup
character is easier to spot.  (And for those who know HTML,
knowing that !! == <h2> is a nice mnemonic.)  

Beyond that, being somewhat consistent with other markup systems
is probably a good idea, and I don't know of any markups that
do headings along the lines of the proposed !> (heading indent)
and <! (heading outdent) syntax.  I think many authors would think
the end result looks pretty weird.  For example, consider the
following markup:

    ! heading 1
    !> heading 2
    ! heading 3
    ! heading 4

In looking at this it's not at all obvious to me that heading 3
and heading 4 are at the same level as heading 2 (not heading 1).
Also, once I'm nested two or three levels in, how do I get back
to the top level in one jump?

"Spaces are possible in pagenames.":  As noted in 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/RoadMap, I'm planning to
allow pagenames to have spaces at some point in PmWiki's future --
likely in 2.3.0.  The hard part isn't necessarily the spaces,
but rather how to add this feature without totally breaking
existing sites.

At any rate, when spaces are incorporated in pagenames, PmWiki
will undoubtedly use underscores for spaces, as that's more
consistent with what people have come to expect on the web.

"...remove the [=...=] syntax from being used often.":  I'm
all in favor of this.  We obviously need some form of "escape"
syntax, but if we come up with a better one we migrate things
over to it, and we can probably be cleaning up the existing 
documentation to avoid it where it's no longer necessary.

Lastly, before designing a whole new markup syntax, keep in mind
that there are often very good reasons for the existing markup, and
for not designing a new markup in a vacuum.  In particular,
it would probably be a good idea to look carefully at
Creole (http://www.wikicreole.org/), which a lot of wiki engines 
are adopting as a simplified wiki markup.  (In fact, having
re-examined the Creole specification just now, I think it's
very likely that PmWiki will offer Creole support very soon
now, especially since most of the Creole syntaxes are already
very close to PmWiki's defaults in many areas.  More on this
soon.)

Lastly lastly, for the record, I'm all in favor of having
"specialized" communities within the PmWiki wikisphere
that don't directly depend on me for support.  We see this 
happening already with things such as ZAP, WikiPublisher, 
WikiForms, etc., and it's what I've aspired to for PmWiki
all along.  I can even host mailing lists and custom wiki
installations for these specialized communities if desired.
(This offer is also true for Slender, if it looks as though
Slender makes it beyond the discussion/proposal stage.)

Pm




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