Mailing List Archive: Line breaks

Line breaks

May 8, 2003, 5:53 PM

Post #1 of 8 (225 views)

Since the subject seems to have flared up again, I'm writing up my
vision of the future of wikitext syntax. I think the desire of some
here for double-spaced lists and the clarity of the spec can be
reconciled by using a line-break syntax. I like the suggestion "\\"
(double backslash, in case your mailer screws that up).

So here's how it might work: within a line, "\\" gets replaced by a
BREAK element inline, so it can be used anywhere (inside headings,
tables, etc.). When on a line all by itself, a BREAK element is
added to the currently-open block-level element, which then remains
open. Any totally blank line closes the element (as it does now).

So,

# first

# second

will produce

1. first

1. second

just as it does now. But

# first
\\
# second

will produce

1. first

2. second

or to be precise,

<ol><li>first
<br>
</li><li>second
</li>
</ol>

Likewise,

Blah blah

Blah blah...

is rendered as

<p>Blah blah</p>
<p>Blah blah...</p>

but

Blah blah
\\
Blah blah...

becomes

<p>Blah blah
<br>
Blah blah...</p>

BTW, I did look at the links provided for other efforts at
unifying syntaxes, but they both seemed to me to be too complex
and too different from out current syntax to be practical here.
I really think I can make a syntax that is dead simple, not a
drastic change, and more powerful. I'll post the URL here when
I finish the writeup.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

May 8, 2003, 6:20 PM

Post #2 of 8 (223 views)

I think it's much more important to be able to produce nice PSs/PDFs from
wiki markup than to introduce even more magic into it. It's magical enough as is
and most people don't have ease-of-use problems with it, but we still don't have
any way of doing high-quality printing.

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

lists at dramatic

May 8, 2003, 6:54 PM

Post #3 of 8 (225 views)

On Thu, 8 May 2003 19:53:07 -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> gave
utterance to the following:

> Since the subject seems to have flared up again, I'm writing up my
> vision of the future of wikitext syntax. I think the desire of some
> here for double-spaced lists and the clarity of the spec can be
> reconciled by using a line-break syntax. I like the suggestion "\\"
> (double backslash, in case your mailer screws that up).
>
> So here's how it might work: within a line, "\\" gets replaced by a
> BREAK element inline, so it can be used anywhere (inside headings,
> tables, etc.). When on a line all by itself, a BREAK element is
> added to the currently-open block-level element, which then remains
> open. Any totally blank line closes the element (as it does now).
>
That doesn't solve the problem of wanting to put a string of block elements
within a list item (perfectly legitimate HTML)

--
Richard Grevers
If teenagers dress to express individuality why do they all look alike?

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

May 8, 2003, 7:23 PM

Post #4 of 8 (227 views)

> I think it's much more important to be able to produce nice PSs/PDFs from
> wiki markup than to introduce even more magic into it. It's magical enough as is
> and most people don't have ease-of-use problems with it, but we still don't have
> any way of doing high-quality printing.

Actually, that's right at the top of the document I'm writing as one of the
goals of the syntax. That's why, for example, I'm specifying output in terms
of a DOM, not just HTML.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

May 8, 2003, 7:35 PM

Post #5 of 8 (224 views)

> (Richard Grevers <lists@dramatic.co.nz>):
>
> That doesn't solve the problem of wanting to put a string of block elements
> within a list item (perfectly legitimate HTML)

You can still put lists inside a list item; you just can't put
paragraphs or PREs. I'll have to think about how big a problem
that is, if any.

It's certainly /not/ my intention for wikitext to be able to
represent any possible DOM--just the most useful, powerful subset
that keeps it simple enough for newcomers to edit.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

T.Corell at t-online

May 8, 2003, 9:03 PM

Post #6 of 8 (224 views)

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> I think it's much more important to be able to produce nice PSs/PDFs from
> wiki markup than to introduce even more magic into it. It's magical enough as is
> and most people don't have ease-of-use problems with it, but we still don't have
> any way of doing high-quality printing.

Any idea how this should work? I tested to get it converted to LaTeX, but
HTML tables are very complicated to convert. OK, they are nearly the only
problem, to be correct.

Smurf
--
------------------------- Anthill inside! ---------------------------

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

May 8, 2003, 9:30 PM

Post #7 of 8 (226 views)

> Any idea how this should work? I tested to get it converted to LaTeX, but
> HTML tables are very complicated to convert. OK, they are nearly the only
> problem, to be correct.

DocBook does tables well. It should be reasonably simple to render
wikitext as XML with the DocBook DTD, then produce PDF from that
using something like FOP.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

Re: Line breaks [ In reply to ]

May 9, 2003, 4:07 AM

Post #8 of 8 (224 views)

Lee Daniel Crocker schrieb:

> So here's how it might work: within a line, "\\" gets replaced by a
> BREAK element inline, so it can be used anywhere (inside headings,
> tables, etc.). When on a line all by itself, a BREAK element is
> added to the currently-open block-level element, which then remains
> open. Any totally blank line closes the element (as it does now).
>
> So,
>
> # first
>
> # second
>
> will produce
>
> 1. first
>
> 1. second
>
> just as it does now.

I still haven't seen an article where this makes any sense.

> But
>
> # first
> \\
> # second
>
> will produce
>
> 1. first
>
> 2. second

It's just a bit less ugly than

# first <br><br>
# second

But I do agree that we need something to replace the <br> tags, because
they are needed in some rare cases (but are overused - at least in the
German Wikipedia - in normal article text).

I appreciate efforts in making things cleaner and more standardized, but
I think that it's more important to keep editing simple and intuitive.

Kurt