- From: <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:25:08 -0400 (EDT)
- To: sandro@w3.org
- Cc: alanruttenberg@gmail.com, public-owl-wg@w3.org
wiki) From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> In-Reply-To: <18379.1193115437@ubuhebe> References: <20071022.151632.118657967.pfps@research.bell-labs.com> <18379.1193115437@ubuhebe> X-Mailer: Mew version 5.2 on Emacs 22.1 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org> Subject: Re: editing documents in a wiki Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:57:17 -0400 > "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> writes: [...] > > > > Note that the round-trip has to be able to produce > > > > wrapped lines for editing and then not produce diffs related to this > > > > wrapping, unwrapping, or re-wrapping, or any artifacts of the wrapping. > > > > > > Is your concern here: > > > - you don't want some tool messing up where you-as-editor > > > put the line-ends? The wiki shouldn't be a problem here. > > > or > > > - you want people to be able to see the changes for what they really > > > are, not the changes in line-end placement caused by emacs flowing > > > text? The wiki diff tool sucks (IMHO), but there are external > > > HTML diff tools we can use. > > > > Well, this and more. I want the wiki download mechanism to wrap long > > lines for me and not have line wrap changes show up in the diffs, but > > also have the line wraps in short line persist. (I could live without > > the last.) > > I still don't really understand. I wouldn't expect any tool to mess > with line breaks / wrapping. The people editing the page just need to > agree on some conventions -- ie keep margins < 80 columns and re-fill > paragraphs as necessary, or don't use line-breaks inside a paragraph. Some editing tools treat line-breaks as starting a new paragraph, some don't. Some editing tools auto-wrap long lines on display, some don't. (Some may even auto-wrap paragraphs.) Some editing tools automatically add line-breaks to break up long lines, some don't. If anyone uses a tool that silently auto-wraps long lines on display, then they won't be producing text with short lines because they will never see the long lines. If someone uses a tool that automatically auto-breaks long lines, then they will be producing paragraphs with internal line-breaks. So I expect that, without some help from the wiki software, or some very strong social pressure, documents will have a mixuture of long lines and line breaks. > For myself, I prefer to keep margins < 80, and re-fill paragraphs as > necessary. I guess I can live with people doing it the other way. I prefer margins about 75 and extra logical line-breaks, e.g., at the ends of sentences, at least in text that will be reformatted for display. However, line breaks are significant in some wikis in some places, so this treatment of line-breaks can cause problems. > Within Wikipedia it looks like there is no consensus: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_use_line_breaks > > ... although that pages hasn't changed much in years. Maybe some > consensus has emerged and is not expressed there. > > - Sandro It turns out that newer versions of Emacs contain a mode (longlines) that actually can work well no matter how the line-breaks are distributed. It even allows display of line-breaks to show you exactly what is going on. I just found out about this mode, so I guess in some sense I care much less about the problem now than I did just 15 minutes ago. peter
Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2007 07:32:57 UTC