> One of the good things about TiddlyWiki5 is that it is more > standardised than TiddlyWiki and some of the unnecessary quirkiness is > being eliminated.
Good, that's certainly the idea. > One minor area where TW5 still retains this quirkiness is in the > template syntax, see: > > https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/blob/master/tiddlywiki5/tiddlywiki5.template.html Right, yes, definitely, there's a number of things that carry over from the old cook/ginsu world that are distinctly creaky. The other one that concerns me more at the moment is the recipe file format. I think it conflates two things: specifying tiddlers to load into a store, and plugging those tiddlers into an output schema. My thinking is to separate them out into two separate file formats. > in particular the use of HTML comments <<!--@@name@@-->> for the > template parameters. It would be good if TW5 could, rather than invent > its own template syntax, use an already established syntax, or a > subset of such a syntax. One possibility is to use the variable syntax > used in Jinga2 Templates > http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/ > > I'm not particularly advocating Jinga2. If someone thinks there is a > more widely used or more suitable template language, then I am fine > with that. One advantage of Jinga2 is that it is used by TiddlyWeb. > > What I am advocating is that TiddlyWiki5 uses an existing standard, > rather than create its own. > > I agree this is a minor point. But every time TiddlyWiki creates its > own standard, rather than uses an existing one, it makes it slightly > less usable/adoptable. And it means TiddlyWiki potentially looses out > from some unexpected benefits that result from the use of a > pre-existing standard. I suspect that you'll disagree violently, but here's how I see it: The wikitext in TiddlyWiki is already its own templating language. I'm talking about PageTemplate, ViewTemplate etc. In classic TW these templates are written in HTML, but in TW5 they are written in wikitext. The difference will be subtler when I add support for HTML tags within wikitext. Even today, evaluated parameters give users a tiny bit of the expressive power of templating engines like mustache (and especially with things like the ForEachTiddlerPlugin). The HTML template in the recipe file will thus become an ordinary tiddler that when wikified renders the full HTML page. So, given that perspective, my approach to mustache, Jinga2 etc. is to use them as inspiration for extending the templating-like capabilities of wikitext. Going back to your original points about easing the comprehension of TiddlyWiki by reducing the number of unique characteristics that need to be learned, my primary goal is to do that by having a very small set of features that work together in a uniform manner at many different scales. So the mechanisms that people will use to arrange their tiddlers into a sequenced story would be the same mechanisms that you'd use to arrange menu items in a sequence. And of course the primary mechanism within TiddlyWiki is this transformation of tiddlers from one representation to another, and so you can see the attractiveness of developing a single paradigm to accomplish that, and then using it to provide multiple features within the application. I also note that people who want to write Jinga2 or mustache templates are already pretty well catered for; they should just use those products, and should be able to do so happily with the TW5 representation transformation engine if they want. TiddlyWiki isn't aimed at web developers, it's designed to give capabilities to ordinary, reasonably intelligent users that would normally be the domain of expert web developers. Best wishes Jeremy -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] http://www.tiddlywiki.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en.
