plaintxt.org

Mark at the Weblog Tools Collection announced the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.0 a bit earlier today and on my way home this evening I had a great idea for a plugin.

An idea that I will not be able to create myself, because, frankly, I’m too busy with the Sandbox and another upcoming project. Hate to be vague, but more is to come.

My idea is based on my needs. Maybe others would find this useful. Feel free to steal this idea and make it reality. Please.

Anyhow, here’s the idea.

I like what WordPress has done with the composition GUI starting with WordPress 2.1. I like that I can tab between WYSIWYG (sort of) and code. But I personally find the quick buttons above the actual composition section less than useful.

I like to promote semantic markup (see Sandbox) and so I try to be as diligent with my use of proper attributes with HTML elements. I always use title wherever possible, cite with blockquote, etc.

Also, HTML has lots of wonderful, forgotten elements, such as q, abbr, cite, and on and on. Granted, most users don’t use these elements. But I’ll be brave enough to say that they should. And maybe they would if they were more convenient.

For more on these elements, have a look at Semantics, HTML, and XHTML and mezzoblue’s markup guide. It’s sure be convenient if these elements and they attributes were nicely placed in that little bar above my composition window.

Most importantly, I’d like to see some way to integrate the class and id attributes into elements without having to type them. Perhaps there could be a place where I could define the classes I use and reuse (regardless of theme) and click-and-plop them in as a write.

Think class="alignleft" for images and such. I could just have those there. This would help me be use classes consistently and improve the semantic nature of my markup too.

I’d call this plugin the “Semantic Markup’er” or something like that. Who knows. I’m not its author.