Images

I just checked a first working version of images into github. It’s far from complete, but with such source document:

image:foo/bar.jpg

… the stylesheet receives a n:image element containing foo/bar.jpg. How beautiful. It is supposed to work the way URL do and offer a uniform syntax. It addition, it’s more or less used elsewhere, see http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/ImagesReasoning.

But it’s crap. It’s wrong, it’s inconsistent, it will not be comfortable.

URL exist on their own line because this makes copy-paste easy. There is no operating system supporting image: as a protocol. And URL are links to another resource, while image:... represents the resource itself.

Other wikis need the image: prefix because they accept a / in the middle of the content. Novelang requires the solidus to appear as literal. Therefore something like screenshots/preferences.png cannot be confused with three words with punctuation signs or symbols inbetween.

Current image support takes paths relative to the project root, but a path relative to current Part file is comfortable in some cases. If the image is in the same directory, we need to make the solidus character appear so we’ll have ./preferences.png (instead of preferences.png which could be two dot-separated words).

The extension is enough to make the difference with other resources. Almost everybody knows that .jpg, .png, .gif, .svg are for images, and it leaves room for other stuff like .csv.

In a previous post about tables, I stated that image declaration would be too long to fit in a cell, but with relative path and no image: prefix this has to be revised.

Images are definitely not the same thing as URL, but the decorations should work the same way, with an identifier and a name.

Then, the identifier could replace the image, or provide some kind of reference. I’ll tell more about identifiers another day but here’s a complete example using two different source files.

First file: we declare the image, decorating it with metadata.

  \dog-with-bone
  "My dog with its bone"
/photos/dog.jpg

Second file: using images declared above.

See a picture of my dog:

\dog-with-bone

... later in the text, we want some reference to the 
picture to appear, like its name, some hyperlink or 
a figure number (depending on the stylesheet). 

You have already seen my dog in -\dog-with-bone .

Finally, it seems we’ve the best of every world with a compact notation.