[Pmwiki-users] Re: markup musings - notation idea
Patrick R. Michaud
pmichaud
Sat May 22 08:22:44 CDT 2004
On Sat, May 22, 2004 at 01:15:04PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 2004, John Feezell wrote:
>
> Just for comparison, I've written the examples below using '->'.
The thing I don't like about -> is that the most common form of
link should be a plain link to another wiki page, as in
[[free link]]
Somehow it seems weird to me that if I want to substitute a different
text for the link--a less common operation in a site that has useful
page titles--that I then put the text before the target instead of after
it. But perhaps this is just a feature of the cognitive model for links
I've been using, when perhaps the real model should be that the
common case is
[[link text]]
such that the [[...]] always denotes the text to be used in the link,
and then the -> or other notation says where the link should go if it's
someplace different than where the link text would naturally take it.
Unfortunately, I think that this second model would confuse people who
are already used to the web. When creating a link, my natural inclination
is to first decide/specify "where I am linking to" and not
"what should the link text be". Thus I feel the target should go first.
One can then say to reverse the arrow direction and use
[[target <- link text]], but this likewise confuses me at first
glance because "<-" implies to me a "going backward", when in
reality the link is taking someone "forward" to another location.
In general, the cognitive model I think I use is "I want to create
a link (i.e., [[...]]) to a target and sometimes specify some other
text for that link." Contrast this with "I want to create a link
with this text and sometimes go to a different target."
I think that part of the reason this works is that in the wiki,
unlike in HTML <a ...> tags, the target of the link can actually
be a useful component of a sentence or other phrase.
Pm
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