Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Re: [Phpwiki-talk] 3-single quotes and 5-single quotes broken?

[Lawrence A. <la...@us...>]

At 05:14 07/12/2001, Steve Wainstead wrote:

>I'd like to move (again) to a syntax like the NBTSC Wiki, which is in line
>with suggestions by many users over the last two years. Ali went for
>syntax that is a lot like how people do things in plain text elsewhere:
>
>*bold*
>/italic/
>
>I think are two examples. Ali's reasoning was the marked up page language
>should be as easy to read/understand as the rendered page.


Yes, yes, yes.  People understand that.  I am often asked why *bold* 
doesn't work.  Another useful one from the email world is > as a prefix for 
a blockquote.

There are other motivations behind wiki markup - I have listed a few at

http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/PurposesOfWikiMarkup

There is also an excellent discussion (imho) of how wiki rules can go bad 
(and suggestions for making them good) at

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SillyTextFormattingRules



>Now, the one thing that has troubled me about both the plugin syntax and
>the proposed plain text tags is they are not consistent with the markup to
>date... and inconsistency is not good for the user. As PhpWiki grows in
>features, though, I understand it gets harder to maintain consistency.
>
>I'd like to see some proposals that are consistent with our current
>syntax, or some way that would be compatible with NBTSC syntax.


It is hard to think of a "natural" way of indicating that you want to 
include a block of text without markup (eg code).  Zope structured text ( 
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/STX ) uses a paragraph followed 
by :: to indicate that the next indented block should have no markup at 
all.  You can also use text ending in "example:" to indicate the same 
thing.  That's a bit fancy for me.  The :: (or something like it), followed 
by indented text, might be OK though.  You don't need a closing tag in that 
case.  You just stop indenting to return to normal.

Also, its hard to think of a single character (which is what NBTSC's markup 
mostly uses) which can sensibly be used to indicate a block of 
code.  Whatever is chosen may well appear in the code itself, and would 
have to be escaped, which defeats the object.

I would like to implement a solution to the code problem.  It is a big 
difficulty for my users, you need to quote php code a lot without having to 
scan for and double up on square brackets all the time.  Hence my patch 
(see other thread!).  Ideally, I would like to do something that can be 
adopted in PhpWiki as a whole, rather than just patch my 
implementation.  That way, my site remains consistent with phpWiki 
generally, and I don't have to keep patching my code on every cvs release!

Steve, how about implementing my patch (or something like it) in the short 
term, and we can then discuss (perhpas on the wiki itself) moving towards 
NBTSC markup in the medium term.  I am wholeheartedly behind that move, and 
would be delighted to help implement it.

Lawrence