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#13 2006-01-29 01:32:44

marknumberm
Member
From: Minneapolis
Registered: 2005-11-29
Posts: 46

Re: Code in article titles

The failure mode for the current method is a minor cosmetic degradation.

I’m not trying to waste your time. And I guess if it’s impossible, then it’s impossible, and we’ll all just have to live with it. :)

But I have to say that it’s more than a “minor cosmetic degradation” at issue.

Nearly every organization that issues guidelines on language (MLA, APA, AGPS, MHRA, etc. — see a list here ) requires that books, magazines, newspapers, plays, legal decisions, etc., be italicized or underlined.

Not being able to follow those rules in a txp article title greatly limits the uses to which one could put txp. That seems pretty important to me.

Last edited by marknumberm (2006-01-29 01:34:27)

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#14 2006-01-29 01:40:08

zem
Developer Emeritus
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-04-08
Posts: 2,579

Re: Code in article titles

And I guess if it’s impossible, then it’s impossible, and we’ll all just have to live with it. :)

I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying we need a solution that doesn’t break stuff.

Nearly every organization that issues guidelines on language (MLA, APA, AGPS, MHRA, etc.—see a list here ) requires that books, magazines, newspapers, plays, legal decisions, etc., be italicized or underlined.

In citations and bibliographies, sure. You can already do that with Textpattern. But in headlines?


Alex

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#15 2006-01-29 02:36:23

marknumberm
Member
From: Minneapolis
Registered: 2005-11-29
Posts: 46

Re: Code in article titles

…But in headlines?

Yes, any time you use the title of a book, magazine, etc.

If someone were writing a paper about a book, the title (or heading) of the paper would have the title of the book in italics. (Two Cities in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities)

And it would look very odd if it were left in non-italics along with the rest of the title, don’t you think?

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#16 2006-01-29 02:41:06

Anark
Member
Registered: 2004-08-14
Posts: 101

Re: Code in article titles

> In citations and bibliographies, sure. You can already do that with Textpattern. But in headlines?

Yup — he’s right. According to pretty much every style bible out there, the titles of long works (such books) get italicised whereas the titles of short works (such as poems, short stories, essays, press reports) get quotation-marked. Even in titles and headings.

Footageheads: The Socio-demographics of Fandom in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition

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#17 2006-01-29 16:57:07

kiplet
Member
Registered: 2006-01-28
Posts: 33

Re: Code in article titles

Movable Type and WordPress can both handle markup in article titles with no problem, though WordPress weirdly chokes on quotes inside tags, so calls to “class = “ are right out. But otherwise, you can markup the title anyway you like, and it’s stripped out for feeds and permalinks and the title element itself and etc. (Actually, I think my old MT 2.x install left it in for the title element, but it’s been awhile.)

I’ve got a blog going back 4 years that I’d really like to move over to Textpattern, because I very much like what I’ve seen so far. But this is a peculiar lack I never thought would be a lack. Is there any sort of workaround to allow the titles to appear in the body as I want them to appear and have had them appear for years elsewhere? —Without it, this is pretty much a dealbreaker.

Adding: okay, it looks like <a href=“http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=12285”>you could do this in 4.0.1 with a couple of plugins</a>. I guess I’m off to figure out how to revert until it can be handled more “officially.”

Last edited by kiplet (2006-01-29 17:05:42)

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#18 2006-01-30 00:46:13

Jeff_K
Archived Plugin Author
From: Vancouver, British Columbia
Registered: 2005-08-19
Posts: 202
Website

Re: Code in article titles

Because a lot of my work involves working with MLA styled text, I have come accross this problem as well. I use a custom field for full titles and another for subtitles. I haven’t tried italicizing titles within titles, but I have had success adding footnotes within titles. One thing that happens though is that <code>& a m p ;</code> gets converted to simply & and sends of an XHTML validation warning. The decision to not italicize titles within titles for us has mainly been from a graphic design standpoint. It would be ideal to have the option though. For accessibility, it would be nice to have acronyms within titles as well.

As far as the points mentioned by Zem above, perhaps html tags could be stripped before a title is output to RSS.

Jeff.

Last edited by Jeff_K (2006-01-30 00:50:41)

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#19 2006-01-30 01:09:16

zem
Developer Emeritus
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-04-08
Posts: 2,579

Re: Code in article titles

It’ll be handled “officially” when someone submits some code.

Someone (Wet?) wrote a patch a while back, but it caused the kinds of problems I listed above.

Last edited by zem (2006-01-30 01:11:29)


Alex

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#20 2006-01-30 02:00:45

Jeremie
Member
From: Provence, France
Registered: 2004-08-11
Posts: 1,578
Website

Re: Code in article titles

zem wrote:
The failure mode for the current method is a minor cosmetic degradation.

Just a little thing: despite what – almost? – everybody’s said on this thread, in HTML book’s title are *not italized (or underlined or whatever). They are marked up with the cite tag (and btw it’s its only purpose, it’s not a quotation tag).

So it’s not a minor cosmetic failure, it’s a – not that minor, but not major – semantic failure.

That been said, one thing though. Why limit the Textile parsing to a uber light version? Yep it’s cleaner, but it seem harder to code. Let Textile parse it all, if an author breaks something with it, so be it it’s on him.

How would we handle:

Some non-tech suggestions:

titles in RSS and Atom feeds

The same way it’s handled everywhere else

titles in emails

The same way it’s handled right now when content is mailed.. (it’s stripped I think).

titles in lists (e.g. on the content > articles tab)

Apply the Textile parsing, no ?

the title attribute of article permlink tags
the <title>...</title> tag

Strip it.

links in breadcrumbs

Apply the Textile parsing.

Also, how do we distinguish between an article title like “big bold text”, and “about the <br /> tag”?

Move the the <> parsing up in the queue process, so that Textile tags are parsed but not raw html.

Last edited by Jeremie (2006-01-30 02:05:42)

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#21 2006-01-30 02:37:32

KurtRaschke
Plugin Author
Registered: 2004-05-16
Posts: 275

Re: Code in article titles

If we allow the full version of Textile, then display that title without any processing in article lists, things could get ugly, fast. Do we want the full range of HTML ending up inside an <li>? I certainly don’t think so. You could theoretically have, for example, an HTML table in the title field—and I really can’t see how that could be acceptable.

I think what Anark proposed is probably the best solution—allow a limited range of tags (which Textile already has a mode for), and strip all tags when needed.

-Kurt


kurt@kurtraschke.com

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#22 2006-01-30 02:44:53

Jeremie
Member
From: Provence, France
Registered: 2004-08-11
Posts: 1,578
Website

Re: Code in article titles

As I said, that would be better if it’s easy to do (aka light Textile vs full Textile). If it’s not that easy to do, the full version is fine by me, not perfect but fine. You can already broke Textile quite easily if you want to.

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#23 2006-01-30 04:48:13

KurtRaschke
Plugin Author
Registered: 2004-05-16
Posts: 275

Re: Code in article titles

Easy to do?

It’s the difference between textileThis($thing, 1) and textileThis($thing).

-Kurt


kurt@kurtraschke.com

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#24 2006-01-30 06:37:38

nardo
Member
From: tuvalahiti
Registered: 2004-04-22
Posts: 743

Re: Code in article titles

no seriously, an article NAME and article TITLE? like with category & sections?

  • the NAME is basically what we have now and is default for everything (article titles, <title> tag, rss, etc)
  • the TITLE is an additional toggle-able (maybe from advanced prefs) field above the body textarea which can be output by <txp:title title="1" /> for the (probably minority) users who require typographic niceness

however as Jeff_K says, you can kinda do this anyway with a custom field, so…

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