[pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Re: Dynamic wiki trails

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Tue Mar 15 17:36:03 CST 2005


On Wednesday, 16 March 2005 11:09 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
>On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>> So, instead of modifying URLs, let's use cookies.
>
>Sure, it's less transparent but persistent. This might cause other
>confusion (imagine someone who bookmarks a page and when he then visits it
>later on the trail is completely different...)
>
>> We can set a "trail" cookie on the browser that identifies the reader's
>> current trail, then the <<|{?trail}|>> or <<|{$TrailCookie}|>> markup
>> displays the trail path corresponding to the cookie.
>
>Do you mean that {?arg} would check for 'arg' in the user's cookie? I 
>still think we should have a general mechanism here, it might be useful 
>for lots of stuff. However, I really like being able to extract arbitrary 
>arguments from the URI, so I'd like to keep {?arg} for that
>purpose...
>
>> The cookie gets set by any trail map page containing a
>(:trailpage:)
>
>Couldn't we use an explicit directive for this, e.g.
>
>	(:cookie-set trail={$FullName}:)
>
>and then
>
>	(:trail (:cookie-read trail:):)
>
>/Christian
>
I can't help feeling this may be over-complicated...

Let's recap and see if we can simplify this thing.

The goal is to let an author set up a TrailPage and any pages on the
trail automatically gain <<|TrailPage|>> navigation.

If a particular page is on more than one trail, it gets more than one
set of previous / next links.

Thought: what if we put [[!Trail]] on any trail pages?

Then Category.Trail will list all trail pages in the wiki and can
be used to generate trail navigation for any page. There may be a
performance issue with big sites, but perhaps there is a way around
that.

Then we could automate trail links in several ways:

- a markup:(:trails:) statement in a templage

- (:trails:)(:nl:) as a prefix to all GroupHeader pages

- (:nl:)(:trails:) as a suffix to all GroupFooter pages

We might want the ability to override the automatic placement by
putting (:trails:) anywhere on a page, but perhaps this could be 
a lower priority for now. Placement in general ought to be 
consistent from page to page.

The only down-side I can see to using category markup is speed.
But this is a general issue with categories. For example,
maybe the category memberships could go onto a 
Category.AllCategories page (cf RecentChanges):

* [[{$FullName}]]: [[!cat1]], [[!cat2]]

Just trying to come at this from another direction. 
-- 
JR
--
John Rankin






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