[wikka-community] INI parser for action metadata and extensible formatters

[Dario Taraborelli]

So what do these three things have in common?

Here's some background. Today I started playing with the Google Chart  
API [1] and I must say it's tremendously powerful.
Try it yourself by embedding something like this in a wiki page:

""<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? chs=250x100  
&amp;chtt=Market Share 2008 &amp;chd=t:60,15,10,15 &amp;cht=p3  
&amp;chl=January|February|March|April" alt="Sample chart" /> ""

or

""<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? cht=t &amp;chs=440x220  
&amp;chtm=europe &amp;chco=ffffff,edf0d4,13390a &amp;chld=ITFRES  
&amp;chd=s:Af9 &amp;chf=bg,s,EAF7FE" alt="Sample chart" /> ""

it'd be very easy to write a formatter extension taking as an input an  
INI-format [2] series of settings and rendering a Google Chart as  
output. E.g.

::(google-chart)
cht=t
chs=440x220
chtm=europe
chco=ffffff,edf0d4,13390a
chld=ITFRES
chd=s:Af9
chf=bg,s,EAF7FE
::

the same could also be adapted to parse parameters for a google-maps  
formatter [3], e.g.

::(google-maps)
center=45,76878;2,56658;
type=satellite;
zoom=7
width=250px
marker=1; 45,76878; 2,666; DarTar
marker= 2; 46,54763; 3,666; WikkaWiki
::

I just realised that Olivier is also considering an INI format for  
storing action metadata [4] so I thought we could just integrate an  
INI parser and reuse it for extensible formatters [5] or something  
similar to structured data [6] as well.

If we were really smart we could also have our extensible formatter  
recognize other formats on top of INI (e.g. XML, CSV or PHP arrays)  
depending on the formatter key (e.g. google-chart) specified

What do you think?

Dario



Refs

[1] http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file
[3] http://wikkawiki.org/GoogleMap
[4] http://wush.net/trac/wikka/ticket/446
[5] http://wikkawiki.org/WikkaExtensibleMarkup
[6] http://wikkawiki.org/StructDataActionInfo



--
Dario Taraborelli
Wikka Development Team
http://wikkawiki.org