Tegan Dowling said... > On 3/24/07, marc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I fail to understand the difficulty > > it seems to cause; I haven't encountered anyone who couldn't deal with > > the syntax once understood - a one sentence, one time thing - no > > different to '' for emphasis, etc. > > <snip> > > Surely, if you don't want the behaviour, then don't add whitespace to > > the start of your lines. > > I often create wikis for use by people whom I never have an > opportunity to train. I provide what training I can to the primary > users, in the amount of time they are willing to give me, working with > whatever level of technical proficiency they may or may not have. > Those trainees then go back to their organizations, or just email the > password to someone else, and the secondary users log on and click > edit (if we're all really lucky). Whenever the trainees or the > secondary, tertiary, etc users encounter a situation in which the > plain, unadorned text they enter (or paste in) fails to provide the > output they (reasonably, based on their experience with Notepad) > expect, we run the risk of having them declare that wikis are just too > damned hard to for them to be asked to work with.
With respect, dumbing down features to meet the inability of folk to adapt is not a road that I wish to travel. The feature in question requires as trivial a piece of knowledge to circumvent as is possible - one leading space; I would suggest that folk who can't cope with that syntax are going to struggle mightily with almost all other wiki syntax. > A simple leading whitespace can be all the difference between > successful adoption and the failure of a new wiki, if it rubs the > wrong person the wrong way. Well, they really should be less sensitive! Nevertheless, I'm not seeing this behaviour at all. I work globally, and this past week I've been in Asia where I have a few clients who have adapted to PmWiki in house with ease. As it happens, I've suggested PmWiki to a few voluntary and sports groups while socialising, and the uptake has been terrific - folk love that they can alter content themselves without an intermediary "webmaster". A lot of these folk don't speak a European language, and some of them don't fully understand the Latin alphabet, yet no-one has been in the least bit fazed by the leading space syntax. To me, this is a solution looking for a problem. I'm completely unconvinced that the change is necessary. -- Cheers, Marc _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
