> No, please. The idea is to be *able* to override field names if one wishes to, and choose, for yourself, non-colliding field names if one wishes not to. I don't wish to lose the power of being able to, say, define a page title with YAML format if I want to, or to write a site-specific plugin which calculates a page title, or other nifty things.
>It's not like one is going to lose the fields defined by the meta plugin; if "author" is defined by \[[!meta author=...]] then that's what will be found by "field" (provided the "meta" plugin is registered; that's what the "field_register" option is for).
> I don't think ikiwiki *has* a "style" for docs, does it? So I followed the Perl Module style. And I'm rather baffled as to why having the docs laid out in clear sections... make them less clear. --[[KathrynAndersen]]
> The point is exactly in the generalization, to provide a uniform interface for accessing structured data, no matter what the source of it, whether that be the meta plugin or some other plugin.
> There were a few reasons for this:
>1. In converting my site over from PmWiki, I needed something that was equivalent to PmWiki's Page-Text-Variables (which is how PmWiki implements structured data).
>2. I also wanted an equivalent of PmWiki's Page-Variables, which, rather than being simple variables, are the return-value of a function. This gives one a lot of power, because one can do calculations, derive one thing from another. Heck, just being able to have a "basename" variable is useful.
>3. I noticed that in the discussion about structured data, it was mired down in disagreements about what form the structured data should take; I wanted to overcome that hurdle by decoupling the form from the content.
>4. I actually use this to solve (1), because, while I do use ymlfront, initially my pages were in PmWiki format (I wrote (another) unreleased plugin which parses PmWiki format) including PmWiki's Page-Text-Variables for structured data. So I needed something that could deal with multiple formats.
> So, yes, it does cater to mostly my personal needs, but I think it is more generally useful, also.