David Scotson

Does anyone know if the formatting module in the current wiki is pluggable. I'd be really interested in adding Markdown if it is.

Also here are some links related to this discussion:

A wiki (written in ruby) called instiki that allows markdown as a formatting option:

http://instiki.nextangle.com:3000/instiki/show/Markup+Languages

It also allows textile (which is the main inspiration for the Wiki-like format and rdoc, a ruby code documentation format.

There is also a PEAR library in PHP for parsing Wiki Text:

http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?area=Text_Wiki

This could be easily slotted into Moodle, everywhere that Markdown currently is. Unfortunately, while it is more truely wiki-like, there is no actual standard for Wiki markup so it probably differs in a few places from the markup in the actual Wiki.

You can add emoticons in the text formats too

Yes, it is sometimes correct to have an empty alt text, especially if the image is decorative or the relevant alt text is already present.

I'm not sure that applies in the case of the emoticons though, as the images are also clickable links that perform an action (adding the emoticon to the text) so without an alt text you have a link with no link text.

Perhaps alt="add to post" would be better?

The other tricky aspect of this particular case is that many text-browsers do not have javascript support, maybe alt="add to post with javascript"?

I think either of those, or the blank alt attribute will be better than the filename which is what is currently added automatically in lynx

http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoodle.org%2Fhelp.php%3Fmodule%3Dmoodle%26file%3Demoticons.html

Also, I do not have access to any screen-reader software (such as JAWS for windows) to test what it would do in this situation. Does anyone else?

(I also found this interesting link, which is semi-related: the anti-javascript FAQ)

img tags require alt attributes to be valid XHTML. To be accessible, which is the eventual goal of the move to XHTML, the alt tag should most often have text in it.

It would make sense to add this alt text at the same time if the change is being done by hand. If the replacement it is being automated then I would suggest using alt="changeme" so that alt attributes that have intentionally been left empty don't get confused with those that have only been added to achieve XHTML compliance.

This short article explains the basics of alt text: http://www.gawds.org/show.php?contentid=28

Firefox is reporting the classes in the HTML. These act as hooks that you can hang CSS on, but there are more than you need so that you can create different looks by altering different parts of the site.