Macros vs WYSIWYG Styles

Help / Discuss
1

Dear Devs and Community,

in the wake of our long delayed update from 8.4.3 to 10.X, I came to wonder what our users should use for highlighting info/warnings/errors/boxes. With the latest stable comes the greatly appreciated feature “Macro Content Prefill”. But the “Styles” feature of the WYSIWYG Editor seems still more convenient?

e.g.
grafik

{{warning}}
Macro Warning
{{/warning}}

VS.

(% class="box warningmessage" %)
(((
HTML Warning
)))

Which way would you say is to be preferred?

The style has the big advantage that it is inline-editable within the editor. Adding wiki syntax like Page-Links is a huge pain when using the macro.
The macro may be seen as the “legacy” version since it has probably been around since bevor the WYSIWYG Editors came into life?
Yes the non-macro version is more verbose, but that does not matter if all users are noobs and nobody is editing in xwiki syntax mode.

[Update#1] Is there any difference on server side in performance when rendering documents that include lots of macros or style infos? (e.g. cpu usage) Or is this completly irrelevant?

Thank you for your Feedback.
Best regards,
Mario

2

Hi,

I’d go with the following approach: If it’s only for the looks take the style, if you can get anything else from the macro than looks go with the macro.
The majn reason for me to request the macro content fill was to have a way to apply the code macro, which contains mostly only text and the code macro provides code highlighting, protects the formatting and I like to have code explicitly marked as code.

Hope that helps.

3

Yep, completely agree, which is why we’re currently working on adding the ability to edit inline macros that have markup content! Hopefully that should get implemented in XWiki 10.9 or 10.10 or 10.11, i.e. within 2 months, possibly one more if we lag behind.