Wiki Page As Hierarchy

Does a Wiki Page always have a Hierarchal Structure?

In theory, yes

• the page name/title is the root (we'll call that level0)

• if you have a page of straight paragraphs of text, each one is level1

• if you have bullets below a level1 line, then those are at level2. Bullets-below-bullets become level3, etc.

Why should we care? Want to view/edit in other tool/format...

• Folding Wiki Page

• Wiki PageAsMindMap

• Wiki PageAsOutline

Complications

• what if you go too many levels deep for HTML?

• what is you want to indicate subheads within a page?

  • and did you represent the subhead "properly"? For instance, because I hate the way that Structured Text handles headings, I tend to just indicate a subhead by having a short line that's bold. So if I want to play this game, maybe I need to switch to a different SmartAscii format with heading styles that I prefer.

  • what if you have some subheads, but you don't have a subhead at the very start of the page? Are those "top" level body-text paragraphs level1, and the first subhead you run into is level1, and the body-text paragraphs after that subhead are level2?

    • I suppose that isn't the end of the world.

    • but what if you're going "in the other direction" (e.g. you've rendered the page hierarchy into some format used by another tool, now you're going the other way to write back out to SmartAscii and save as a Wiki Page)? Will that level1 subhead get turned into a regular paragraph, with the level2 body-text paragraphs getting turned into bullet points?

• what about more complex chunks of text?

  • examples

    • pure HTML - maybe this shouldn't be supported for a part of a page (maybe each Wiki Page should be a single "type", and you use Transclusion to include it as part of a larger document)

    • table - might be in pure HTML, or some SmartAscii format

    • horizontal rules - might be the HTML tag, might be some SmartAscii; could be an indication of a need for a subhead?

    • preformatted text - often used for chunks of terminal-dump, or space-encoded table entries

  • maybe treat as a complex single node?

    • but SmartAscii typically doesn't let such structures be anything but level1

    • but we can think of them as level_i+1, relative to the immediately-preceding line of level_i

    • so if rendering to another format for use there, we just hide the contents of that node in some meta-data, which some generic label appearing as a summary.