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While looking at http://www.plone.org (runs on zope), there are several user interface things I liked.

One of them was the marker for WikiWordsWhichDontExist, which in TWiki has always bugged me (a big '?'), because:

  • users not familiar with wiki or twiki wonder what all those ?'s are
  • it makes readability difficult
  • looks like a punctuation mark, so the sentence looks like a question
  • makes simple cut & paste of the (rendered) page difficult, since text appears polluted with ?'s
    • one of my requirements is: wiki pages must be able to be copied into email, and visa-versa, with minimal cleanup.

On plone (and some other wiki's), the ? marker is a more non-descript superscript character.

So I finally got around to changing it. Lazy programmer that I am, I expect this to just work. This uses the superscript asterisk * instead of ?

  • Reasons for using *
    • small character, better readability
    • plone uses superscript x which doesn't work for cut & paste of the page (see above) - an alpha is not good
    • it's not a punctuation mark so doesn't affect the sentence
    • possible others are @ # but not ! % ^ & do to readability; also I figured > might mess up a regex somewhere post rendering.. as would <

TWiki.pm exerpt, from latest release version.

    } elsif( $doLink ) {
        $text .= "<span style='background : $newTopicBgColor;'>"
              .  "<font color=\"$newTopicFontColor\">$theLinkText</font></span>"
              .  "<a href=\"$scriptUrlPath/edit$scriptSuffix/$theWeb/$theTopic?topicparent=$webName.
$topicName\"><sup>*</sup></a>";
        return $text;

    } else {
        $text .= $theLinkText;
        return $text;
    }

-- JonathanCline - 09 May 2003

I would object to * for human factor reasons. StarAfterAWord* reminds of a footnote, i.e, something that is defined elsewhere. QuestionMarkAfterAWord? seems more intuitive...

-- ColasNahaboo - 09 May 2003

Well--

  • the marker is a defined link: it links to the empty page.
    • as a mnemonic, it can be anything. Per my requirement, it can not be a normal punctuation character or alphabetic character.
  • what seems intuitive to us is not the answer to the question. Too bad there's no test group. The question is: what looks best to a user who has never seen wiki before, does not know what html is, and has a difficult time grasping the concept.
    • in my experience, the first comment made by newbies after looking at a content page the first time was, "What are all those question marks?". I would have prefered their first comment to be "it looks clean/readable/neat".
    • The first obvious thing should not be the "missing information". It should be the actual content.
    • once users know what wiki is about, they create content. Thus they learn what the mnemonic marker means, after the fact.

I've underlined your examples, to make them look more like links. I think I like ThisExampleWord[*] better. It depends on the skin font, of course.

-- JonathanCline - 09 May 2003

I wonder if there's a better name for this page? Some candidates:

If someone with Admin privileges agrees, perhaps it could be renamed?

-- RandyKramer - 10 May 2003

I understand why JonathanCline want get rid of question mark after non-existent WikiWord. ? was inherited IIRC from original Wiki, which was simple in style of extreme programming. What is good for mean XP gurus, might not be adequate for plain users.

Better solution IMHO (if anybody - not me wink will code it) is to have some nice special icon to [create] page, which will be rendered as link (possibly an icon) in standard browsing view, and as nothing when skin is "print". But I am not sure if this is possible - skin should not change page content frown . If feasible, we could have best of both possibilities: something nice to click on to create new page, and page without this for printing.

I support RandyKramer in his campaign to use "page" instead of topic (and "zone" instaed of "web"), but I am afraid that renaming to NonExistentPageMarker (or MissingPageMarker) is not going to happen frown : for gurus with renaming rights, our struggle to change missing page marker, or rename topic to page is just a noise. They have real code to hack, features to add, real users to satisfy (which are trained in old ways) - and real life to live wink .

-- PeterMasiar - 11 May 2003

It is possible, and even one more pledge to make more use of CSS. Make the ? use a special class, that "print" skin CSS can set its attribute "display" to "none", e.g. make the engine render:

  NonExistentWikiWordMarker<span class=metachar>?</span>
and a "print" skin would turn off rendering of all metacharacters...
  .metachar {display:none}

More generally, I think we should make the engine just position CSS tags on elements, not define directly the style, and let the CSS stylesheet do the work... This works in all browsers. Using CSS2 to actually place contents is something a bit too advanced for the current browsers in actual use.

-- ColasNahaboo - 12 May 2003

Yes, using CSS is a good idea (I'm assuming it's possible; I haven't followed HTML past v3.2). Making it a perl variable for customization would just be unnecessary slowdown/feature creep, I think. But an important part is also the superscript (or subscript if that's the preference).

-- JonathanCline - 13 May 2003

Colas, your CSS trick to get rid of ? in print skin is so advanced - it is like a magic for me. wink Does your skin KoalaSkin do it? Or, do we have a clean CSS based skin which can accomodate this? FlexibleSkin is the only skin with goal to be CSS, IIRC.

-- PeterMasiar - 13 May 2003

On Mbawiki.com and http://testwiki.mrjc.com I use a graphic *. This is a cut-down version of Colas's KoalaSkin graphic used for the New button. I think this helps associates the fact that clicking on the * takes them to the same dialog as does clicking on New

-- MartinCleaver - 15 Dec 2003

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Topic revision: r9 - 2003-12-15 - MartinCleaver
 
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