Re: [Phpwiki-talk] NewTextFormattingRules, DynamicTextFormattingHelp

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002 12:46:23 +0200
Matti Airas <ma...@ik...> wrote:

> >   Named anchors:
> >      #[foo]       An anchor around the text "foo" with id "foo".
> >      #[|foo]      An empty anchor with id "foo".
> >      #[howdy|foo] An anchor around the text "howdy" with id "foo".
> >   References to name anchors are made thusly:
> >      [#foo], [OtherPage#foo], [named|OtherPage#foo] ...
> 
> OK, added. I actually tried to get them work already while writing the 
> documentation in the first place, but couldn't figure out how they 
> work. :-)
> 
> I'm still wondering about the anchor generation, however. Shouldn't it 
> be automatic, so that headings and maybe some other special markup (or 
> maybe three first words of each paragraph) would be automatically 
> anchored? That would make it easier to refer to some arbitrary text 
> passages such as 
> http://mairas.net/wiki/NewTextFormattingRules#References (doesn't work 
> yet).

Either of those suggestions is certainly doable, but my concerns are:
  1. They can lead to very unnecessarily long anchor names.
  2. Duplicate anchor names are possible.
  3. It might be too much magic.

Example:

!! #[References]

is explicit.  Everyone can see that there's something special
about "References" (even if they're not sure what it is.)

> >   The new "nestled" emphasis:  *bold*, _italic_, and =monospace=.
> >   (I think ''emph'' and __strong__ are quasi-deprecated.)
> >
> >   The old-style list markup works (more or less) as before.
> >   I'm not sure whether this is worth mentioning on the page or not...
> 
> OK, I removed traces of old-style markup and made the page use new 
> markup only. At the moment the page is quite badly broken, but it can 
> be thought of as a test case. :-)

Upon second thought, maybe the old-style ''emphasis'' __isn't__
deprecated.

> > Currently, in older browsers, I think your [DynamicTextFormattingHelp]
> > 
> > patch shows both old and new help messages.  I'm not sure whether 
> > that's the best thing to do in this case...  (pros: all the info is 
> > there; cons: cluttered, confusing...) Comments?
> 
> This was my intention, although I agree it might not be ideal behaviour.
> 
> However, at least for some time the majority of existing pages are 
> written using OldMarkup, and it would be very confusing to edit them 
> without any kind of reference. Maybe it would be safe to assume that 
> people using browsers with Javascript disabled or without proper DHTML 
> support would be advanced enough to be able to handle the UI 
> degradation? Or is there still a significant amount of corporate 
> Netscape 4 users to worry about?

Other concerns are: lynx, links, emacs-w3, etc...
Not a big deal
> Given an unlimited amount of headache pills, I could try to implement 
> support for IE 4 and Netscape 4, but I'd rather not (those proprietary 
> DOM implementation deserve to die).

I agree completely.  It's not worth the effort or code clutter to fix
those cases.