[emacs-wiki-discuss] Anchors and Lists and file extension defaults---migrating from html and emacs-wiki

[Phillip Lord]

I'm currently migrating my home pages from html toward muse. I've used
emacs-wiki mode for some parts of my home page for a while. Moving to
muse seemed like a good opportunity to do the port in general. 

I have a couple of questions coming form this experience. 

First, there seems to be different criteria for list markup seems
different between
emacs wiki and muse, in that muse requires a space before the "-" while
emacs-wiki does not. So

- this
- is
- a
- list

in emacs-wiki, while 

 - this 
 - is 
 - a 
 - list

in muse. Is there any reason for this? It's not an enourmous amount of
work to change all my emacs-wiki files, but I couldn't quite see why is
was this way. 

Secondly, one part of my website (my emacs packages page, ironically
http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/emacs.html)
uses lists with anchors, something like this...


  <ul>

    <a name="pabbrev.el"></a>
    <li>
      <p> 
        This is my new abbreviation expansion mode.      </p>
    </li>

    <a name="lazy-desktop.el"></a>
    <li>
      <p>
        <a href="./download/emacs/lazy-desktop.el">
          Lazy Desktop</a> interacts with the standards desktop.el 
        package. </p>
    </li>
  </ul>    

(apologies if the formatting comes out bad--I've just before forced to
use outlook, and it does terrible and uncontrollable things to the email
it sends). 

I can't replicate this behaviour in muse, because of the interaction
between the two markup's. Anchors have to be the start of a newline, and
this, sadly, plays havoc with the list markup. 

No idea what to do about this, except to wonder whether anchors could
occur of the start of a line. Then 

- #pabbrev.el This is my new...
- #lazy-desktop.el This interacts with...

should work. 


Finally, I have a general comment on initially emacs-wiki and now muse.
I would put a plea that the default behaviour to have no file extension
be changed. I often use make to build my websites, combined with
emacs-wiki and now probably muse. I like to be able to build form a
command line outside of emacs (as well as inside!). However, Makefile's
always get recognised. It also prevents easy autoloading of muse (as
muse has to be loaded to recognise files) and requires the use of
find-file-hook which makes me a bit scared! I was very happy to discover
muse-mode-auto-p and muse-file-extension. I'd suggest that "nil" and
"muse" be set as default. 



Overall, muse is an excellent piece of work, and I'm very grateful to
all those responsible. I think it's going to become one of my more
heavily used packages. I don't want to sound overly critical--it's meant
to be constructive. 

Incidentally, would there be any interest in my ".ht" publishing style.
It's quite small, and I expect that the number of people in the world
insane enough to use both muse and ht2html (another excellent package)
will be quite small....

Phil