[pmwiki-users] RFC: Link titles

[Petko Yotov]

Hello. I'd like to read your thoughts about an implementation of "tooltip 
titles" of internal links. 

The tooltip titles are small boxes appearing when the mouse cursor moves over 
a link or a picture and can give some additional information for the reader 
about the linked site, page, file or image.

I would like to enable this syntax:

   [[WikiPage"Tooltip title"]] displays WikiPage
   [[WikiPage"Tooltip title"|link text]] displays link text
   [[WikiPage"Tooltip title"|+]] displays the title of the page
   [[WikiPage"Tooltip title"|#]] a number/reference

1. This would be consistent with the markup used for tooltip titles of 
embedded pictures which have been available for 6+ years:

   http://site/picture.jpg"Tooltip title"
   http://site/picture.jpg"Tooltip title" | caption text
   Attach:picture.jpg"Tooltip title"

2. This would be consistent with the markup for external links, InterMap links 
and links to attachments:

   [[http://pmwiki.org"Tooltip title"|link text]]
   [[Wikipedia:Free_Software"Tooltip title"|link text]]
   [[mailto:address at example.com"Tooltip title"|link text]]
   [[Attach:file.zip"Tooltip title"|link text]]

   Titles for external links were captured and processed in this format since
   2006, but were not displayed in the default installation, although this was
   documented and admins could enable it in config.php. Version 2.2.14, 
   released 20 months ago, started displaying the tooltip titles by default.

3. Also since 2006, PmWiki captures the "..." part in internal links like a 
tooltip title, but instead of using it for a tooltip title, it keeps it in the 
link text (not in the link target page, [[Page"Tooltip title"]] links to 
[[Page]]). Fixing this would require only a few minor changes.

These are the reasons to adopt the [[WikiPage"Tooltip title"]] markup: 
consistency with other tooltip markups, easy to implement, unlikely to break 
existing wikis.


There is a reason why not to implement it this way, notably PmWiki.RoadMap 
suggests the format [[Link|text|title]]. In a previous discussion,
* 3 users+Pm preferred that format
* 5 users preferred [[Link"Title"|text]] : 

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/24697

So I'd like to know what do you think about this feature. Note that 
implementing it will not break existing wikipages - internal link titles never 
worked - but it will allow future improvements of accessibility for those who 
need it.

Petko

Other links:
  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/RoadMap
  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/01172 Add "title" attr. to internal links
  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00657 Add "title" attr. to external links