Development Proposal: Text Handling

[klees]

Dear colleagues,

after @nicoroeser brought up the question about text handlling in ILIAS (once again...) we had a productive meeting with various interested developers on the initiative of @dsstrassner.

This proposal tries to answer the questions and requirements brought up in the meeting by proposing a tool set for text handling in ILIAS.

Best regards!

[klees]

Dear JF,

it would be nice if I could pitch this shortly on 08-08, so people can ask questions, propose changes, voice concerns, etc. If this still looks valid after 2 weeks, it would be nice to discuss and hopefully adopt this on 22-08.

Thanks!

[matthiaskunkel]

Jour Fixe, 08 AUG 2022 : Richard explained his intention for this PR and invites all developers to discuss this proposal and to ask questions or post change requests. PR will be discussed again on the next JF at 22 AUG 2022.

[kergomard]

Thank you very much @klees for this proposal! I believe this to be a big step forward in the right direction.

• As stated in my comment above, I think it is a very good choice to avoid any formatting-related language and promises in here.
• I believe the choice of baseline representations to be sound. You state there that "[t]hese conversions can be lossfull". Currently I think this should explicitly not be true for the conversion to HTML. I can see cases where people could want that to add machine readable elements in a text, but I currently think that it would be useful to explicitly prohibit this case, in order to separate content for a user (ie. text) from content for a machine (ie. programming). All other conversion should explicitly be allowed to be incomplete as stated now.
• On a completely other level: As stated in another context I feel uncomfortable right now with the plan to implement this in a Markdown field for the kitchen sink. Personally I would prefer to first analyze the space of texts we need to cover in ILIAS and make sure that we can cover that with a maximum of two different user facing ways to input these texts into the system. I'm currently unsure if this is going to be possible with markdown and it makes me nervous to think that we would be permanently adding one more input method without getting rid of existing ones.

Thanks again and best!

[klees]

@matthiaskunkel I won't be available on JF 22-08-22 for private reasons, please postpone this to the next JF.

[matthiaskunkel]

Okay. Then we talk about it on the JF at September 19.

[matthiaskunkel]

Jour Fixe, 19 SEP 2022 : We highly appreciate this suggested and ask Richard to complete the proposal for text handling.