[pmwiki-users] Re: About the feature "Endings become part of, the link text."

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 12:31:54AM +0800, Elias Soong wrote:
> I have test this on the Chinese main page of pmwiki.org. Gladly it is 
> what I need. However, I don't know if there are any non-european 
> language need "Ending become part of the link text", so this may not be 
> a safe bet. 

As we identify such languages, it's not at all hard to add them to the
set of "allowed suffix characters".

> Furthermore, there may be some English site want use UTF-8 
> encoding to be compatible with more languages.

Yes, which is why I chose the particular solution I did -- for sites
that are using european languages in a utf-8 character set (including
English), they end up with the suffixes being part of the link text
in exactly the right places.

> Now, I suggest another choice. We could allow .XLPage file control this 
> option, then wiki administrators could choose for their own need. For 
> example, we could turn off "Ending become part of the link text" by 
> default for PmWikiZhCn.XLPage file.

I thought of using an XLPage option, but this would go against
exactly the situation described above.  Suppose I have a site where
my primary language is English, but I want to use utf-8 encoding
for pages because some of the pages will contain a mix of english
and asian text.  (Yes, there are such sites.)

An on-or-off option doesn't help here; if the site administrator
uses XLPage to turn off suffixes, then they can't be used for the
English links; if the site administrator uses XLPage to turn suffixes
on, then the asian language portions of the page suffer because
they're treated as suffixes.

So, the better solution seems to be that only european characters 
are considered for suffixes (we can increase/modify this as the need 
is identified).  This also has the advantage of not requiring an
additional and potentially confusing "suffix" option in the XLPage
file that will require documentation and explanation for people
creating those files.

Lastly, for any site that really needs something odd in turning
suffixes on or off, the administrator can set the value of 
$SuffixPattern explicitly.  :-)

Pm



> >On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 05:56:57PM +0800, Elias Soong wrote:
> >
> >>Surely, "Endings become part of the link text." is a good feature for
> >>English, but most asian language not use spaces. I suggest put this
> >>feature to be an option of i18n settings and default to be actived. Then
> >>we could set Chinese XL-Page disable this feature.
> >
> >
> >As a slightly different approach, I think I've been able to modify
> >the suffix pattern so that it only accepts "european" characters
> >in the suffix.  (These are code points U+0020 to U+058f for those
> >who follow such things.)  Non-european characters, such as those
> >that come from asian languages, are not included in any link suffix.
> >
> >Does this sound like a good approach to you, and could you test
> >this on pmwiki.org (in one of the utf-8 groups) and let me know
> >if it seems to be working the way you would want for Chinese?
> >
> >Thanks!
> >
> >Pm
> 
> 
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