| At line 120 added 70 lines |
| Of course both semantics and presentation have their place. Obviously, you |
| want to use presentational markup (or even better, just WYSIWYG editor) in |
| any kind of a desktop publishing, typesetting or graphical software for a |
| printshop. Especially if you have graphical skills and experience with |
| typography. |
|
| On the other hand, if you're a writer, this is all additional work for you. |
| Work, that is better delegated to the responsible professionals, like |
| typesetters or web designers. Why should you be burdened with "beautifying" |
| your text to make it readable, when this can be done automatically? |
|
| Another advantage of semantic markup is its portability. The "literal" new |
| lines are a good example here -- they make it impossible to adapt the text |
| to a different page width. Note, how you can **always** convert from semantic |
| markup to presentational (actually, it's done every time the text is |
| displayed), while it's impossible to do it the other way around. |
|
| Certainly, we don't want to duplicate HTML, nor we dream to cover all the |
| possible meanings of text. On the other hand, we also don't want to duplicate |
| PostScript or TeX, which are page-description languages. What we aim for is |
| a healthy balance that leaves the least number of worries on the editor's |
| head, while providing him with enough expressive power. |
|
| Of course, the definition of "enough" will change from a wiki site to a wiki |
| site, and certainly is totally different for a content management system like |
| your [Barghest]. That's why we want to provide the minimum, and let it be |
| extended when needed. That's how we don't need to cover all possible semantic |
| meanings. If we wanted to go presentational, we could simply just put all |
| the enterd text in a large "<pre>" tag, with some additional rules for |
| substituting "*" for bullets and changing fonts. |
|
| Quoting text is a very important thing in wikis, and I'm sure it deserves its |
| own markup. I don't mean the "thread mode" here or quoting in a discussion -- |
| I mean quoting other sources than the wiki site on which the quote appears. |
| Currently, it's incredibly clumsy in all the text markup languages I know -- |
| including HTML and all wiki markups I had contact with. |
|
| Then again, identing, has no meaning. I know people who indent all their text |
| just because they like to have larger left margin. It will also produce |
| improper markup for lists -- when people make a "multi-paragraph" list items |
| intead of using headings, like this: |
| {{{ |
| # First paragraph of item one |
| : Second paragraph of item one |
| # First paragraph of item two |
| }}} |
| I see no sane way to handle this correctly and keep the numbering of lists the |
| way it is expected -- we best avoid this. |
|
| I fail to see how using ":" instead of ">" makes it better -- it has all |
| the disadvantages of ">", plus makes it more weird and less compatible with |
| e-mails. Isn't it a little short-sighted to advocate certain markup just |
| to make a one-time job for a single person easier? |
|
| Then again, I think we don't really want to be compatible with e-mails |
| in this case. I mean, e-mail quoting serves a totally different purpose than |
| normal text quoting -- when you quote an e-mail with some ">" in it, you |
| most likely wnat the ">" characters preserved! |
|
| The exact rendering of the document is left to the engine. You can use |
| the "<q>" tags alone, or with the tricks described in the article I linked |
| to, or just put the HTML entities for the quoting character. You can even |
| do a server-side browser detection if you feel like it. |
|
| You still need a formal markup for the quotes -- because even for plain |
| English text the auto-detection of the characters is not possible in every |
| case (consider "'Tis a fools' errand"), and we don;t want to make Creole |
| specific to the English language. Making it a markup for whole quote, rather |
| than for the single characters seems saner and less prone to errors. |
| -- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-01-01 |
.