[Pmwiki-users] ?pagename= addresses

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 12:18:15PM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2004-12-09  08:21 PM -0700, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >So, any objections, comments, or criticisms to:
> >1.  using ?p= over ?pagename=  (?pagename= will still continue to work)
> >2.  changing PmWiki to default to ?p= -style urls, and switch to
> >    .../Group/SomePage urls only if the administrator explicitly
> >    enables it?
> 
> Both ideas sound fine, but will this change not affect instructions such as 
> those on the page PmWiki.Passwords where it says:
> "add ?action=attr to the page's URL" ???

Nope, PmWiki understands multiple ?'s in the query string and treats them
as if they were ampersands.  Thus if your URL is .../pmwiki?p=Group.SomePage, 
then you can still get to the attributes page by appending ?action=attr
to the URL (similar for ?action=edit, ?action=diff, etc.).  For example:

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki?pagename=Main.WikiSandbox?action=diff

Of course, the ampersand still works if you prefer that, but having
PmWiki's instructions say "add &action=attr to the URL" wouldn't work on
sites using the PATH_INFO variant.

IMHO it would've been much nicer if the Common Gateway Interface
(CGI) specification had just used '?' as the variable=var separator for
the entire QUERY_STRING, instead of just indicating the start of the
QUERY_STRING.  The use of '?' in this way would've been far superior to
'&', especially since any '&' must be written as '&' when used in
HTML documents (including href= attributes).

Pm