[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: can pmwiki handle hierarchical content?

[chr@home.se]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> [[./SoundCards]] does seem natural, but keep in mind that doing this is
> actually quite different from what we normally experience in URLs, HTML, and 
> filesystems.

If I enter this URI in my browser (Opera):
	http://www.md.kth.se/~chr/pmwiki/tree/Linux/./Hardware/

it ignores any './' inside the URI and simply gives me
	http://www.md.kth.se/~chr/pmwiki/tree/Linux/Hardware/

This also seems to be the way it works from a wiki page, see here:
	http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/LinkWithDots

where I find that:  ThisGroup:./././././LinkWithDots is equivalent to 
ThisGroup:./LinkWithDots.

So as long as you think of 'this page' as being your point of reference
you can argue that [[./SoundCards]] could naturally be considered a link
to ThisPage:./SoundCards, because that's how URIs (inter-links) already
work.

> Similarly, if I'm running a script called "/home/pmichaud/bin/myscript", 
> and inside of that script I make reference to a file called "./data", the 
> referenced file is "/home/pmichaud/bin/data" and not 
> "/home/pmichaud/bin/myscript/data".

An observation: Your examples assume a path structure like this

	directory/directory/directory/file

so to make it correspond to for instance a current page of

	Linux/Hardware/SoundCards

we should interpret both 'Linux' and 'Hardware' as groups. (With the 
consequence that it gets confusing if Linux/Hardware also is a page)

> I'm not necessarily saying that [[./SoundCards]] can't work, I'm just
> pointing out that it's at odds from what people experience in other 
> contexts (e.g., authoring HTML documents) and therefore might be a source 
> of confusion.

Well, it is a good point. One of the points I'm trying to make is that we
should have the same (or a similar) "arithmetic" for URIs as we have for
page paths, because it's URIs that normal authors use (and not file
systems).

> If I'm editing Linux.Hardware, it's entirely reasonable
> to expect [[./SoundCards]] to refer to Linux.SoundCards--i.e., the
> "SoundCards" page within the group of the current page (i.e., "Linux").

I agree, that is also a reasonable interpretation, especially if you are
used to working with file systems. Based on these two interpretations, we
can formalize a rule for how [[<some-path>]] should be interpreted:

* [[<some-path>]]  becomes ThisPage:<some-path>	
* [[<some-path>]]  becomes ThisPage:../<some-path>

If the current page is Linux/Hardware, then (from a URI point of view)

	ThisPage: = ThisWiki:/Linux/Hardware

Applied to the markup [[./SoundCards]], we get 
* ThisWiki:/Linux/Hardware/./SoundCards = ThisWiki:/Linux/Hardware/SoundCards
* ThisWiki:/Linux/Hardware/../.SoundCards = ThisWiki:/Linux/SoundCards

So for both cases we can define the "arithmetic". However, for the second 
case we may not use [[./SomePage]] if our current page is the root page.
In other words, if the URI of the current page is ThisWiki:, then
	ThisWiki:.././SoundCards
might point outside the wiki.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr