Re: [extend-a-story-devel] Extend-A-Story and GPL

[Jeff W. (S. Toby) <jjw...@ke...>]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Matthew Fringe Duhan wrote:

> On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 12:57 AM, Jeff Weston (Sir Toby) wrote:
> 
> > I understand your concern that the current approach is not the best
> > way to go at it. In particular, if one wants to add a large number of
> > tags, one would have to add a large amount of code to the decoding
> > functions to handle it. It would be nice if we could make the tagging
> > a data driven element, such that the allowed tags, and how they are
> > decoded, is put in the database somehow. That way someone could easily
> > add new tags to the database without having to touch the code. We
> > could probably build an interface for it. Also, it would make it easy
> > to have different tag schemes that an administrator, or users would be
> > able to choose between. It sounds like your users want a BBCode like
> > scheme, while I think my users are more familiar with an HTML tagging
> > scheme. It would be nice to be able to support both without too much
> > hassle.
> 
> Hmm, now that's an idea that I hadn't considered. I was thinking along
> the lines of additional php modules/includes, but I think that your
> solution is more elegant. Would the admin have to add all case
> possibilities like now? Also, what would we 'match' to? english terms
> like bold, italic? HTML? Something else? Something to ponder.

I think it would be nice if we could keep all the formatting tags in lower
case, just to make things easy. We'll need to make Extend-A-Story smart so
that it will handle formatting tags from users entered in any permutation
of case. As far as what the tags will convert to... I sort of figured we'd
go with a literal translation, similar to what is currently being done in
code. To make things even more expandable, we might use regular
expressions for tag detection, and some sort of substitution for
converting the tag to real HTML (or whatever) code. We may even be able to
work around the case issue with some clever regular expressions.

> Sorry it took so long to reply. Work has gotten busier lately, but
> should calm down again later this week.

No worries. Work has been crazy for me as well. Kinda gotta worry about
putting food on the table before working on hobbies. ;-)

-- 
Jeff Weston (Sir Toby)