I (ChrisSiebenmann) found myself with a genuine need for text set in HTML <strike>. Rather than try to invent a formatting setup for this that did not make me cringe, I just punted to the easy solution: macros that do text formatting.
So, DWiki now has grown the new macros:
ST
for the font styles DWiki didn't already have.C
for character entities, and ShowCharEnts
to show the named
entities we support.AB
for <abbr>, so I could have those
cute inline abbreviation expansion things. Tragically <abbr> is not
supported by IE 6 and less, so AB
may quietly change to generating
<acronym> someday.IMG
to generate <img>. Width, height, and alt text is
mandatory, and there is a hacky way to also roll title text in too.
(Title text is optional.)Through special black magic, ST
, C
, and AB
can be used in comments
(the omission of IMG
is deliberate). In theory this lets a commenter
cause character set explosions, but in practice a bad commenter can just
write UTF-8 directly (UTF-8 is the common and only sane character set
choice, so).
Implementing these as macros means that they have some limitations. You
can't nest C
, AB
, or a differently styled ST
inside an ST
, and
currently none of them can be done inside link text ([[....]]
).
These macros are a bit of a hack. It's relatively easy to implement bits of HTML this way, but I'm not sure if it's good design overall.