Fellow Monks, Back in August, 2001, there was a discussion regarding the difficulty of typing the relatively common left square bracket '[' in nodes. The difficulty arises due to the shortcut mechanism for linking within the Monastery. As things stand, we have to remember the character code: [

In the discussion, several solutions were proposed:

  1. The specific literal character shortcut: &[;
  2. The generic literal character shortcut: &([); or \([)
  3. The simple escape: \[
  4. The ISO entity standard: [ (not implemented in many browsers, therefore would still require special consideration in the Everything engine. As a test for your browser, that entity is used here: [ )

I am curious if any work had been done on this; personally I favor #3 -- the "special" nature of the brackets in the Everything engine is a non-HTML exception and should be handled in a non-HTML kind of way. Any time exception facilities are provided, there should be straightforward "exception exceptions" (or "shortcut shortcuts"). If not the simple escape, then perhaps something more in-line with the existing Everything syntax, such as [[] or [\[] -- not pretty, but straightforward.

I am leary of munging with established HTML standards such as with &[; -- this is inviting trouble since the whole syntax is designed to be a mechanism to properly implement cross-standard character encodings. Not so for merely a single web engine's particular quirky shortcut syntax. If not the simple escape, then at least specifically handle the ISO standard until browsers catch up, since the bracket is integral to the normal usage of Everything.

Regardless, in addition to the Site How To, I think the current escape mechanism should be mentioned in the Writeup Formatting Tips in the Perl Monks Site FAQ and in a footnote on the linking writeup.

Much ado about nearly nothing? Am I only wanting to go into town and pick up some power converters?

Matt

In reply to Plight of the Left Square Bracket ( ) by mojotoad

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.