Re: [Phpwiki-talk] comment syntax?

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

I'll join Steve on the pyre, now he's put his hand in the fire.

I can't see any need at all to allow comments through to the browser.  I 
can just about see the use of comments in the wiki source.  I would not 
like the markup to resemble comments in most other languages eg c++ or php, 
because people who use wiki's for source documentation will be confused by 
text disappearing!  I don't think that disallowing comments in <pre> blocks 
helps - indeed I think it makes it even more confusing.  Anyway, people 
should not have to use <pre> for code blocks if they don't want to (even if 
it *is* a good idea).  And if they don't, they should not find that their 
source code comments have vanished.  It takes enough effort to get people 
to put them in the first place!

So ....

Since comments are only likely to be used by people who know what they are 
doing, we can afford for the markup to be a little unintuitive.  How about 
something like {{comment}}.  (Someone is about to tell me that that is a 
how you define a function in xyz language, no doubt)

Also, whilst I'm on this rant, why should comments not be multiline?  Would 
it be useful to be able to comment out large blocks of wikitext, without 
actually deleting it?  They could be picked up by the block parser, and the 
inline parser, couldn't they?

Lawrence



At 16:04 21/02/2002, you wrote:

>Adam Shand wrote:
>>>>ah, i was orgininally thinking that we could just enable the comment
>>>>html tag and let it pass through to the browser since it won't be seen.
>>>>it didn't occur to me that there was a simpler alternative :)
>>>Ooh.  We could do that, too.  Still not a problem, I think, as long as
>>>the comment text is htmlspecialchar()ed ('<' -> '&lt;').
>>if it can be done without security risks then that would be my vote. the 
>>information isn't secret, just not displayed, so we may as well pass
>>it to the browser, it might be useful for something.
>
>Well, I'll be the curmudgeon here and voice two objections: one, the 
>comment will appear in the HTML source and likely won't make any sense to 
>the end user who views it (and won't know it came from the Wiki markup); 
>and two, we are arbitrarily letting some HTML through and not others, like 
><i> and its kin; so we now send a confusing message to end users ("HTML is 
>not allowed! Use HTML comments for your Wiki markup!")
>
>My preference would be for Wiki-specific comment tags; but thinking of 
>Ari's approach, there is no equivalent in the course of normal writing 
>(except "asides" like this statement in parentheses).
>
>Maybe ((I am a comment)) would suffice. Flame me as you must.
>
>~swain
>
>
>
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