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00773: Escape sequence wygwnsy ("what you get will not surprise you")

Description: (Moved in as separate PITS from 00757)

• Hmmm, thinking in terms of a basic directive, as opposed to some sort of block markup (with opening and closing markup), makes me think of an application beyond cutting and pasting.
  • A directive, lets say (:plaintext:) for the sake of discussion, could be used for basic comment-style content.
    • For example, a (:plaintext:) directive could be placed in the header of a group whose pages will be authored by people who have no prior experience with wiki, or with non-WYSIWYG editing systems generally, whose initial inclinations will be to provide their own formating on-the-fly by supplying spaces to indent paragraphs, and single returns to provide line breaks.
  • In either context (cut and paste or novice wysiwyg commenting) we may want to distingish among different types of markup when deciding whether its interpretation should be escaped. While leading spaces, for example, should not be interpreted to trigger a monospaced font, we might want to retain other markup that is less likely to be inadvertantly triggered. For example, should the interpretation of links to websites, such as http://www.example.com, be supressed. What about simple unordered lists using asterisks? In drawing the various distinctions we could be guided by a wysiwyg experience where, instead of tackling the technical hurdles to represent higher level formatting, we just provided a dumbed-down editing experience. We could could call it wygwnsy ("what you get will not surprise you"). Pico June 13, 2006, at 11:41 AM

Excellent acronym Scott Connard July 05, 2006, at 02:05 PM

Judging from this post, Chr would want to retain the include directive in pre-formatted text.

See HansB's new recipe LiteralWhiteSpace