16 Apr
2009
16 Apr
'09
3:56 p.m.
Hi devs,
We need to come to a conclusion for handling New Lines(NL) and white
spaces (WS) in HTML and Velocity Macro.
If you remember from http://markmail.org/thread/mhqhxnz5twhev5se the
current problem is that we cannot indent scripts since WS and NL are
meaningful.
I'd like to reiterate the proposal that was sent but not enough people
voted on it (only Thomas did).
A) For the HTML macro, we propose to make the following changes:
- strip NL/WS between elements (elements that don't accept CDATA)
- strip leading/trailing NL/WS for element content before passing them
to the wiki syntax parser
B) for the Velocity macro we have 2 choices I can think of:
1) strip all leading spaces for all lines (but keep NL)
Note that this means that inside a velocity macro you wouldn't be able
to have a line break with the new line starting with spaces without
escaping the leading space with ~(space).
Note also that this means we will not be able to add extra new lines
to format the text nicely (since that would add new paragraphs) or
split a single line into several lines for extra readability. This is
the case today with the old syntax and it's a pain not to be able to
aerate the text with empty lines.
Ex:
some text
~ next line #if (...) this goes on the same line #something(...)
#end
This is a new paragraph
In this example notice that we need the velocity #if to be on the same
line since NL are significant.
2) strip all leading spaces for all lines + remove all NL too.
This means we need to ensure we still have one space remaining between
"words" (same as HTML).
The user would use something like $nl and $sp to explicitely enter new
lines and spaces.
The advantage is that you control completely the formatting (no magic
anymore) at the cost of a little extra work (adding the $nl where
required).
Basically this means the same pros/cons as when you work with HTML
where you need to explicitly add <br/> when you want new lines.
Ex:
some text $nl
$sp next line
#if (...)
this goes on the same line
#something(...) <-- this is also on the same line
#end
$nl $nl
This a new paragraph
Note: I've aerated the text by putting extra new lines around the
velocity #if to show that it would work.
3) Same as 1) + strip 1 NL (i.e. line breaks) and only allow "forced"
line breaks with "\\".
The exact algorithm is: if there's 1 NL remove it, if there's more
than 1 leave them.
Ex:
some text\\
~ next line
#if (...)
this goes on the same line
#something(...) <-- this is also on the same line
#end
This a new paragraph
I'm +1 for A)
For B) I think the most flexible is 2) but I'm wondering if it's too
big a change for our users or not. If not 2) then 3).
Thanks
-Vincent