Hi,
On Tuesday, April 15, 2014 11:29:40 PM UTC+2, Stephan Hradek wrote:
>
>
> And it's hard for me to understand what you mean. Maybe you best show some
> real life examples?
>
Okay, maybe this wasn't the best way to introduce the problem. I think
there are two separate questions: (1) Why I would want to do this and (2)
how I want it to function.
Whilst trying to adress (1) I'm not sure I am able to show you how valuable
the suggested use case is or why one would even consider it. It's a
conceptual question that relates to the way of using outlines for
information/knowledge structuring and to a specific way of thinking. I use
outlines to structure thoughts. As it happens most thoughts or propositions
cannot be fully expressed as a simple parent/child statement - instead
there are many parent/child relations possible, each covering different
aspects of an idea, describing connections between ideas and thoughts and
concepts and whatnot. For that reason it would be nice to be able to
"contextualize" specific outline fragments by including them in different
locations/contexts. Practial (artificial) example, while shifting to
question (2):
tiddler named "cupcake ingredients":
* cupcake ingredients
** flour
** sugar
** cocoa
** olive oil
** baking soda
** ...
tiddler named "cupcake reciepe":
* cupcake reciepe
**{{cupcake ingredients}}
** directions
*** make some delicious cupcakes
should render:
- cupcake reciepe
- cupcake ingredients
- flour
- sugar
- cocoa
- olive oil
- baking soda
- ...
- directions
- make some delicious cupcakes
tiddler named "shopping list":
* shopping list
**{{cupcake ingredients}}
should render:
- shopping list
- cupcake ingredients
- flour
- sugar
- cocoa
- olive oil
- baking soda
- ..
Obviously this can be solved by copypasting lists around, but even in this
simple case it is helpful to have not redundancies but linking do the work.
After all, if I decide to list "salt" under "ingredients" but forget to add
it to the shopping list, I would bake myself some tasteless cupcakes,
because I tend to be a mindless list-following groceries shopper...
Do you see how this can be helpful in more complex cases?
It starts to get really powerful for quick-and-dirty information
aggregation where, for instance, I would tag several lists with tag "pro"
and some others with "con" and have them listed somewhere deep inside
another list so I get all pros and cons right in place where I need them
*plus* additional information (e.g. why is it good/bad) encoded as subitems
of these pro and con lists. Maybe I also want to use each of these lists
independently inside another branch, resulting in completely different
contextual meaning.
After thinking about it I realised that there are several difficulties
here. For instance I would need (pseudo)markup like
* item
** {{[tag[pro]]}}
to behave as if each item with tag "pro" was included as a subitem in the
list with ** preceding each item, additionally stripping each * in the
included lists and adding ** to every subitem in these lists. So if there
was a tiddler "list" tagged with "pro":
* fact 1
** explanation of fact 1
*** some subitem of explanation
I would in fact need to behave {{[tag[pro]]}} like a loop with additional
input pre-processing:
for each tiddler with tag "pro":
return
each line with additionally (current level-1) asterisks prepended if it
is a list item OR
each line with additionally (current level) asterisks if there are nolist
items
in the tiddler
And this seems to be a rather unfortunate hack. Of course I could implement
a macro like:
* item
<<include-lists "**" "[tag[pro]]">>
But this makes it hard to read and seems not clean either. So maybe it will
be better to implement a parser module for this kind of markup.
* item
**<<subitem-each [tag[pro]]>>
But which markup should I use? This seems to be a separate kind of content
inclusion mechanism, alongside transclusion and macros.
Does this all look silly to you? Do you understand better now what I mean?
Best,
Stefan
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