[cowik] Question: Why did the user "hire" a wiki?

I see the possibilities, but it seems to me like we are creating another arcane language that is less capable and no easier to master than the HTML to do the same job.  It feels to me like we are focusing on refining the details without considering the end goal of the user.

Obviously we feel the user will want to format their document, but why have they "hired" a wiki to do the job?  What problem is the user trying to solve?  Here are some (incomplete) thoughts that I have:

• Communicate information to a wider audience
• "Living" documents that many can touch
• Low learning curve-- easy to start using (for users)  But this is really an attribute that makes the product suitable for hiring, not a job. 
  

For now, I want to stop here and see what other jobs a wiki may be hired for.

Paul

Archie Campbell wrote:

OK. Plugins and their interpretation of styles aside; I'd like to ignore plugins in their position as producers of arbitrary stuff.

That the style-sheet like attributes on <table>, table rows and cells are from HTML gives their inclusion in the wiki parse their peculiar power. With the capacity to attach HTML attributes to elements in the wiki markup comes a more refined ability to program the output page.

If people are talking seriously of _javascript_, we may even need to address an automatic naming scheme, to provide a solid basis for DHTML coding.

I'm interested in expanding the corpus of wiki elements that accept HTML attributes in the wiki markup.

My suggestions for target elements are lists & wiki markup that mimics HTML.

We could have...

*attr|text
* text

...for a list, and...

<b id="FundamentalJavascriptBoldTag">bold</b>

...for emphatic markup.

Left, center and right at present insert <div>s. They might accept HTML...

<left id="leftmostPositionedElement">**markup**</left>

...that could be very useful in later js.

Regards,

Archie

paulha-jqHnx1hy4Dsdnm+yROfE0A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

http://cowiki.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7






------- Additional comments from paulha-jqHnx1hy4Dsdnm+yROfE0A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Jun 20 08:32:24 -0700 2005 -------
One issue is that not all plugins *can* respond to it.  What would Embed do?  It
also muddies the separation of responsibilities between the model (wiki text)
and the view (provided by coWiki).  The style-sheet like attributes on <table>
are really from html...

Biggest deal I can think of is that every plugin will have to implement it's own
interpretation of styles, and how does that integrate with the template?  As I
think about how to make things self consistent, I raise more questions than I
have answers.  :-(

At the same time, the feature would be great for dressing up pages.
  

I had earlier written thus over issue #7...

------- Additional comments from cmarble-jqHnx1hy4Dsdnm+yROfE0A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Jun 20 07:21:07 -0700 2005 -------
I'm well placed to tackle this.

Style wanted by tables (already),
 lists (pipe syntax like \n*style|text\n* text),
 any HTML markup (b,u,i,tt,fixed,left,right,centre) ?,
 plugins (as mentioned)

Can we discuss this - and any other markup elements that need it?