This feature request results from my recent experience generating Slidy using
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Mw-slidy
Can wikitext be improved to provide more user-friendly support for 'class' attributes? What I mean:
Tom Roche Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:39:42 -0400
I have several long pages on a governmental MediaWiki that I used as rough drafts for a presentation, which (after favorable review) I'd like to turn into "real slides."
I've been able to do this with mw-slidy after convincing the local admins to install it. It basically works as advertised
https://github.com/dov/mw-slidy/blob/master/README.mediawiki
(with one minor exception
https://github.com/dov/mw-slidy/issues/1
) which is great: just add a tag to my wikitext, et voilà! I can display my wiki content as presentation slides.
There is however another problem that doesn't seem to be within its developer's scope, which is friendlier (i.e., easier to write) wikitext support for incremental and outline display in Slidy, as described at
http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/#%289%29 http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/#%2810%29
(I'll just discuss incrementality here, since Slidy enables outline display via a similar mechanism.) Incrementalizing blocks of text (including associated lists) is friendly/straightforward: e.g., I can take the original wikitext
Constraint: joint minimization of
- boredom
- confusion
Solution:
- I'll go quickly ...
- ... until you stop me, whether for
** question ** complaint
and display it in 2 parts (the first showing after I hit the spacebar once, etc) with the addition of only a little markup:
<div class="incremental"> ''Constraint:'' joint minimization of * boredom * confusion ''Solution:'' * I'll go quickly ... * ... until you stop me, whether for ** question ** complaint </div>
But if I want to incrementalize an entire list, I've gotta write HTML, e.g.,
<ol class="incremental"> <li>discuss <em>problems</em></li> <li>target <em>etiologies</em></li> <li>float generic <em>solutions</em></li> <li>pitch specific <em>implementations</em></li> <li><em>discuss</em> ...</li> </ol>
Which obviously loses one of the ease-of-authoring advantages of wikitext. I'd much prefer to write something like, e.g.,
<div class="incremental"> # discuss ''problems'' # target ''etiologies'' # float generic ''solutions'' # pitch specific ''implementations'' # ''discuss'' ... </div>
(Note that, when I do this now,
- in the slidy, all list items displays at once (which is bad) + display in the wiki is unaffected (which is good)
) Does wikitext currently provide some facility for easy annotation of lists with properties? If not, could this be provided? (And please let me know if there is another mechanism for feature requesting, e.g., trac, bugzilla.)
TIA, Tom Roche Tom_Roche@pobox.com