New ikiwiki tags

[jrmu <jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings teammates,

I spoke with izzyb about the tags he wanted to use for ikiwiki.

We both agreed we want to avoid stylistic directives like these:

[[!color  foreground=white background=#ff0000 text="White text on red background"]]

These tend to be html specific and will clutter the repo with unreadable
markup, as well as make theming inconsistent because stylesheets will
get overridden and editors won't remember to maintain these.

I think we agreed to stick with semantic tags.

Izzyb requested this style of directive:

[[!block class=warning]]

He'd use that to format a block of text as a warning.

I had suggested using [[!warning]], or better yet even !!Warning.
! could be caution, !! could be warning, and !!! could be danger

The benefit of my shorter version is that it would not require e any
filtering at all because !! Warning is pretty self explanatory and uses
only typographic marks.

Izzyb however believed that [[!block class=warning]] would be easier to
filter and process.

Full chat logs below:

06:27 <~jrmu> izzyb: I was thinking about the markup last night, can we avoid stylistic directives like these: [[!color  foreground=white background=#ff0000 text="White text on red background"]]
06:28 <~jrmu> These tend to be html specific and I've had at least two teammates say they don't want the repo to be cluttered with this type of markup. The other reason is because, it's also a style override and is going to cause us problems later because stylesheets won't be consistently applied
06:29 <~jrmu> It would be best if we can stick with just semantic tags, it will also make it much easier for you when theming because these kind of style directives tend to go unmaintained
06:29 <~jrmu> (eg, if you later change your css background to white, that text is going to end up appearing invisible)
06:29 < izzyb> morning jrmu. yeah thats why id and class would be better
06:30 < izzyb> so you could just tag it and make such changes via css
06:31 <~jrmu> good morning izzyb. OK yeah good
06:31 < izzyb> thats whats wrong with most html, people use it to do style stuff that belongs in css
06:32 < izzyb> so [[!block class=warning]] would be how I'd like to us it
06:32 <~jrmu> do you think perhaps something like [[warning]] might be even shorter?
06:32 < izzyb> well, that could be done but then would need a filter for each one
06:33 <~jrmu> Yeah. I'll ask IanJ and mkf later, what they think. At least for me [[warning]] looks more human readable
06:33 < izzyb> itd be better to have a single directive with class tags
06:33 < izzyb> well that is a wikilink like that though
06:33 < izzyb> [[!directive]] is how ikiwiki is designed
06:33 <~jrmu> oh yes, I forget it overloads
06:34 < izzyb> where you have named directives starting with a !
06:34 <~jrmu> true yes
06:34 < izzyb> so having a single dirrective with a class our id would allow css to deal with the details of how that looks
06:35 < izzyb> which would make it cleaner
06:35 < izzyb> and easier to filter out if ianj wants to with no harm to the content
06:36 <~jrmu> maybe [[!warning]]?
06:36 <~jrmu> or even !Warning message here
06:36 < izzyb> but then your filter has more work. you need to find multple directives
06:36 <~jrmu> ! could be caution, !! could be warning, and !!! could be danger
06:37 <~jrmu> Yeah, I'll ask IanJ what he thinks, see which he prefers
06:37 < izzyb> yeah, then you need to make sure your listening device understands the additional markup
06:37 <~jrmu> the benefit I think for IanJ is then he wouldn't have to do anything I think
06:37 <~jrmu> he'd just leave !!Warning message here completely untouched
06:37 < izzyb> making it a single directive that can be ignored and stripped or left in for the reader to intemperate makes more sense to me
06:37 <~jrmu> as I think he wants to avoid doing much filtering
06:38 < izzyb> yeah he's not going to be able to get away without some at least
06:38 < izzyb> so making it easier to filter makes more sense to me
06:39 <~jrmu> gotcha, I'll relay that to him
06:39 < izzyb> so a single directive as appose to multiple specific dirrectives makes more sense
06:39 <~jrmu> Actually, on second though, I would personally prefer the typographic marks myself
06:40 < izzyb> the thing I don't like at the moment is the current approach puts the content inside the dirrective in a text='content' type thing
06:40 <~jrmu> because if I were to offer access via email, I might not have time to write a full fledged filter
06:40 < izzyb> Itd be better if the content was kept separate from the directives
06:40 < izzyb> so the directives could be just dropped
06:40 <~jrmu> and !!Warning to me would look less confusing than [[!warning]], which is also less confusing than [[!block class=warning]]
06:40 < izzyb> leaving the uneffected content then
06:41 < izzyb> yeah but you'd need one for every type of content then
06:41 <~jrmu> yeah
06:42 < izzyb> [[!block class=config]] would work better as its only one dirrective to filter or you could leave in and it could be understood by the user as is
06:44 <~jrmu> I'll go ahead and summarize the discussion over on codeforce@xxxxxxxxxx
06:44 <~jrmu> to make sure everyone is ok with the decision

-- 
jrmu
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