[pmwiki-users] random musings

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 04:05:49PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> Group.* and *.Name may look confusing, but they're not necessary
> because group= and name= already exist.  The above is the same as
> 
>     "group=2005,2006 name=-GroupHeader,-HomePage"
> 
> I still don't see why we need both fullname= and name=, since the
> presence of a '.' or a '/' is the only difference between a name and a
> full name.  (...or is it?)

I'm trying to keep some rough correspondence to conditional markup,
where

    (:if name Something:)

is currently equivalent to saying "fullname=*.Something".
If I switch name to instead mean "fullname", then existing sites
may break, unless we introduce special rules to work around it.

Also, we have traditionally made a distinction between {$Name}
and {$FullName}, where {$Name} excludes any group portion.  Somehow
it seems inconsistent to me that {$Name} doesn't include a group
reference while "name=" does.

One possibility is to assume that "name" in conditional markup or
pagelist implies "*."  unless an explicit group is mentioned 
with a dot or slash.  But somehow I think that might confuse 
authors more:

     name=2005*            #   same as fullname=*.2005*  (?)
     name=2005.*           #   same as fullname=2005.*   (?)

But, maybe it isn't confusing.  (None of it is confusing to me,
so I'm having to guess about what might be natural and unconfusing
to others.)  But I do want to preserve consistency wherever we can,
and where possible we shouldn't have the same term ("name") take
on multiple subtly-different meanings such that authors have
to remember which meaning applies where.

Pm