On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 04:57 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
1) I noticed you kept the "space for preformatted
text" syntax. I think
this is one of the single biggest causes of confusion, as it's quite
easy to type:
One line ..
Another line ..
That is, to accidentally insert a space between two paragraphs. The
output will look weird, you look at your source text, but you don't see
what the cause is, as spaces are invisible.
Actually, in the formal syntax I do fix this; spaces and tabs as the end
of input lines are removed, and /not/ interpreted. What looks like an
empty line /is/ an empty line, so no invisible PRE section gets created.
2) Why not think about some alternative link patterns?
I've personally
always thought that double underscores might be cool. Compare:
I like it, but I'm not sure we could sell that one.
3) The template syntax needs to be shorter, since
it's ubiquituous.
Personaly, I think they /should/ be a little more difficult to
discourage their use, but I'm sure that opinion isn't shared by
everyone.
4) We generally have to be careful with hiding
namespaces from users.
<<image file:xyz.jpg>> may be better than <<image file=xyz.jpg>>
or
<<image xyz.jpg>> because it preserves the visibility of the namespace.
Hmm. Not sure I see that as a big issue, but I'll think about it.
b) Using {{..}} creates *huge* transitional issues.
Like it or not,
templates are deeply rooted into Wikipedia, and changing the function of
curly braces to something completely different will confuse the hell out
of many users who use that syntax every day.
That's really not an argument that sways me. No matter how many users
there are now, /most/ Wikipedia users are in the future, and we owe it
to them to make the most usable system we can, even at the expense of
present users.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>