Feature Proposal: Need Something Between Pre and Verbatim

Motivation

I want a way to include code or HTML (as with verbatim) but also be able to do bold and italic.

Description and Documentation

Effectively, I want something between pre (which understands and renders all HTML tags unless they are escaped as entities) and verbatim (which turns everything off).

I want to be able to do something like this:

  if (a < 7) {
    do something
  }

without the need to convert the < into & l t ;

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: VickiBrown - 28 Apr 2008

Discussion

In your example, you do not need to write < for <. In fact, TWiki does a pretty good job when guessing whether a < is a less-than or the beginning of a HTML tag. But including HTML is another matter, of course.

If I understand you correctly, then you want to:

• escape HTML special characters tags in your blocks to <, >, and &
• ...but use TML like *bold* which is converted to "effective" HTML like bold

I'd guess this would be rather difficult to write down a comprehensive specification:

• TWiki variables, e.g. for colouring, which expand to HTML might appear as escaped HTML in your block. Should it be escaped? Probably not, but then this would be pretty difficult to implement.
• Plugins might process TML "too early" so that again the resulting HTML would be escaped later on.

That looks pretty difficult to use or to predict for authors without in-depth knowledge about TWiki's processing order. Maybe you want to write a plugin with a preRenderingHandler for your use cases?

-- HaraldJoerg - 28 Apr 2008