[Phpwiki-talk] Misc. comments

[Arno H. <aho...@xm...>]

Hi all,

I'm back. Some comments on recent developments:

- using stylesheets is a good idea - I'm a fan of stylesheets myself.

- the new layout looks nice, but packing the whole page into a table just=
=20
to make it look nice is not really browser friendly. I suggest using=20
stylesheets and <divs> for this layout trick. Thus older browsers are not=
=20
inconvinienced by a page table.

- the rush for new wiki markup (tables, picture floats, ...) -- I don't=20
like that at all. You are just reinventing HTML all over again. That is=20
*not* the purpose of wiki markup. Sure, the proposed markup is easy and=20
looks efficient, but for a newcomer it gets more and more complicated to=20
learn all these rules - heck, even I won't remember all markup and specia=
l=20
rules in a month if you continue at the current pace.

- the "exchange" of index.php and config.php is good. However, I don't li=
ke=20
messing with the include path. Instead I suggest setting a $phpwikidir in=
=20
index.php and including all other files with "$phpwikidir/lib/filename.ph=
p".
Much easier to understand, less things to mess around. See also next poin=
t.

- the phpwiki code gets more and more complicated. That's against one of=20
our primary design goals (at least we had this goal some months ago). It=20
will become harder to understand phpwiki and new users will feel=20
intimitated by the code. Examples:
   * prepend.php -- why do we need this fancy error postponing?
   Usually (in production), no errors should be displayed at all.
   Only for debugging one may wish to set error_reporting to E_ALL. And
   then I want those messages to appear whenever they actually happen - I
   don't care about the layout then.
   * config.php -- why do we need FindFile(), FindLocalizedFile() etc.
   we didn't need these functions before. What makes them necessary now?
   (see also $phpwikidir above).
There are other places as well. Keep the code simple. Fancy stuff should =
be=20
removed and the code kept clear and easy.

- about the templates: some are proposing to make them more sophisticated=
=2E
I argue against this. The end result is (after adding loops etc.)=20
reinventing PHP or other HTML-embedded languages. When I added ###IF### I=
=20
was very unhappy, but that was that. We had some discussion about this so=
me=20
months ago - dig it up in the list archive.

- object orientation: I know Jeff likes OO, I don't. Could someone please=
=20
explain me the advantages of using classes, when we use exactly *one*=20
instance of this class throughout the whole program? We don't even do=20
inheriting or other stuff. Just makes things harder to understand -- Also=
,=20
I don't consider emacs or other text editors a good development tool for =
OO=20
programs) -- these are also my *prime* argument against Jeff's db API. Th=
e=20
only thing I like about Jeff's API is the PageIterator - that one makes=20
sense.


That'll should do for now. In short: keep it simply. phpwiki is getting t=
oo=20
fancy for my taste.

/Arno