I think it would be best if the tag could be edited from the backend and given a custom tag by the administrator. This would avoid future requests for alternative tags.

Comments

hingo’s picture

hingo commented

Hi Nicholas

Could you elaborate on the above, I don't quite get what you might mean. Give some examples of what you want to do and how.

nicholas.alipaz’s picture

nicholas.alipaz commented

Well this module lets users use the tags: [fn], <fn>, or [footnotes].

Wouldn't it be better to simply allow the admin of the website this module is on to administer the module and change the tag to whatever they like?

i.e. I could change the tag to: [poopnote] in the administration panel.

I hope that is as clear as.... erm... water?

hingo’s picture

hingo commented
Priority: Normal » Minor
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Ok.

So clearly there may be pro's and con's to such an approach. A good question to ask is, why do not any other modules (I know of) expose such a possibility to the administrator?

The answer is that if all sites configured their tags differently, then
a) it will be confusing to users who need to use one tag on one Drupal site and another somewhere else
b) you couldn't copy-paste or otherwise move a Drupal post from one site to another

So the reason Footnotes or any other module isn't allowing this is that this way we strive for standardization. We try to name the tags such that they will be universally known to be what they are and that they will work well for everyone as they are. (For instance, there shouldn't be another module also using [fn].)

I'm changing this to won't fix, having convinced myself with the above argumentation. But thanks still for the suggestion, it was not a stupid idea, it sure has clear pro's too.

nicholas.alipaz’s picture

nicholas.alipaz commented

Thanks for taking it into consideration.

I will counter by saying:

Not everyone uses the same filters on their sites. Hence, copying and pasting won't necessarily work in every situation. Example, I use Markdown for my wiki, but I use full html for all my page/story posts, etc.

The benefit of such modification for me would be that I could add a more suitable tag in my markdown filter. Both [fn] and <fn> are not really the appropriate kind of tags to use within Markdown. One looks like bbcode, the other html. Also, there are many other wiki syntaxes that really don't follow either of those sort of formats, which again promotes customizing the tag. It is my understanding that this module gets a great deal of use within wikis, so it is certainly best to cater to that group.

The best example I can cite is MediaWiki, it uses <ref>. This is by far the most popular wiki syntax. I personally don't like it, but it has it's place.

Just food for thought. I am not trying to be argumentative, just giving you a little more detail on my reasoning. You are welcome to take it or leave it.

Thanks for reading.

hingo’s picture

hingo commented

Hi Nicholas

Ok so your last comment makes more sense to me, completely understandable.

The approach that the footnote module takes to provide different syntax is by providing alternative filters. There currently exists one such filter, which is the Textile variant. With that you can enter footnotes using a syntax that fits well with the Textile markup language. So rather than let a site admin define arbitrarily the syntax, the filter can provide more than one options.

The current approach also has other advantages. By creating variants of the filter (each implemented by their own piece of PHP code) you can adapt to more versatile syntaxes than would be possible with only one filter with an added configuration interface. Also the output of each variant can be different. The Textile variant for instance uses [# footnote text here] to enter the footnote and will output footnote markup, not HTML.

So to throw the ball back to you. What would be the perfect "Markdown-like" syntax you would like to use? I'm not promising to implement anything, but if I did, what should it look like?

Also see #119026: Better Integration with Wiki style syntax where a similar request was already done. Essentially the result there was that you can use [fn] just fine with Drupal's mediawiki filter. However you're correct that to copy from a "real" MediaWiki site it should support <ref>