use of alerts on the help wiki

[Matthew East]

Hi,

Andrew Sayers wrote to me off list recently to point out that there is
a broad range of different techniques used on the help wiki to draw
attention to particular important points in articles. To address this,
he has designed some simple macros which permit us simply to insert
various alerts in pages.

Here is a screenshot of the Warning, Hint and Note alerts that Andrew
has created:

http://doc.ubuntu.com/~mdke/alerts.png

We can of course include any type of alert that we wish, and indeed
Andrew has already implemented a few other types of Alert. However
personally I think that editors are more likely to use these correctly
if we keep things simple, and I believe that those three alerts are
enough. That's similar to the technique we use in the system
documentation.

The usage for the macros is to type something like this:

<<Warning(You should back up your data before performing the following step)>>

It's not possible at this stage to use wiki markup in the text for
italics and code snippets.

So, do people think that this would be helpful in the wiki to
standardise the use of alerts? I have to say that I really like the
idea. Thanks to Andrew for having this idea and the skill to implement
it too!

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF