Namespaces and other stuff (was Re: [Wikitex-l] Re: SVG Support?)

[Phil Boswell]

On 13/02/06, Peter Danenberg <pcd at wikitex.org> wrote:
> > I was thinking "style" but that might overlap too much with CSS :-)
>     "Style"  may  be  more  intuitive than "layout;" on the
> other hand, we might want to reserve "style" for changes  to
> the final image: borders, say, or magnification.
>     HTML  links  in  graph are still on the TODO for beta2,
> btw.

Actually I was thinking about something else entirely which has a
bearing on this, and relates to something you said somewhere about
people not wanting to see nasty code intruding into their nice
wikitext unless absolutely necessary.

There are moves afoot to improve the way that namespaces are managed.

I was thinking that if WikiTeX extensions were created as extra
namespaces, this might make things easier for people.

You could have a "Graph" namespace: you edit the source just like
wikitext, but it's <graph> code instead. Then when you want to add
that graph to a page, you use syntax like this:

  [[graph:nice graph|fdp|250px]]

This would mean that people who know how to use images and the like
would have an automatic jump start on using graphs.

I also think that for production purposes, we need an awful lot better
control over how big the various images are which WikiTeX adds into
articles. People are going to get awful pissed off when their graph
comes in one-size-fits-all.

Lastly, I have been looking at the TIPA and Tengwar extensions, and
I'm really not certain that people are going to be happy having great
huge chunks of text blobbed into their articles as immutable images.
It's one thing to do it with maths stuff, nobody expects huge
flexibility from them :-) However great chunks of text-like things
which don't wrap or change size aren't going to be nearly as popular
as they might be.

Is there any way to make these extensions produce wrappable, resizable
text output?
--
Phil