thoughts on infoboxes
I was thinking about adding a [[preprocessordirective]] to make it easy to
add an info box. Something like:
\[[infobox "text here"]]
But it seems it would be better if multi-line text could be put inside,
maybe expanding the syntax a bit:
\[[infobox "
text here
and here
etc.
"]]
This would just wrap the text up in a span element that was styled to float
to the right, with a border, the way info boxes do on some wikis.
However, as I thought about it some more, I realized that this would be
just as easy to type:
<span id=infobox>
text here
</span>
Why invent new syntax, after all? I see no reason to for something this
simple.
However, maybe in the more complex case, this would be useful. If the
infobox filled in a kind of template:
\[[infobox type=person name="Joey Hess" email=joey@kitenet.net url="http://kitenet.net/~joey/" description="
Joey is the author of ikiwiki and some other stuff. *Yay*!
"]]
That might be a lot more useful. Or here's one to use to describe ikiwiki's
own plugins:
\[[infobox type=plugin name="sidebar" author="Tuomo Valkonen" core=no]]
This would expand by filling out the template page, which would be
infobox/person or infobox/plugin, or whatever, and would have some syntax
(possibly HTML::Template, if it's secure) for testing for values and
embedding variables. Of course it would register a dependency on its
template so changes to the template update all the pages.
(Since it's a preprocessor directive, the big multiline blocks of text can
mix markdown (or whatever) with html, wikilinks, etc, in a natural way,
which is nice..)
