[pmwiki-users] hierarchical groups, revisited

Brehmer, Daniel brehmer at slac.stanford.edu
Thu May 25 19:59:54 CDT 2006


 
On Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 2:53 PM, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 10:41:51PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> > Actually the "correct" way for going from Animal.Canine to 
> > Animal.Canine.Terrier would be [[Canine/Terrier]]. Here are the 
> > analogies that hint in the direction:
> > Going from Animal.Canine to Animal.Feline: [[Feline]].
> > Going from Animal.Canine to Animal.Feline.Housecat: 
> [[Feline.Housecat]].
> > Going from Animal.Canine to Animal.Canine.Terrier: 
> [[Canine.Terrier]].
> 
> I don't disagree; it just seems odd/annoying to be constantly 
> repeating the name "Canine" on the "index page" in order to be
> able to reach the various types of canines.  I'm sure it's one
> of the first things people would want to eliminate.

I agree that this is odd/annoying because it does not match the way we typically move through a directory structure. It seems that the only way to make this work is if all pages are equivalent, just like folders in a directory structure. How do I change from the directory /Animal/Canine to /Animal/Feline? -- cd ../Feline not just Feline! Thus:

Absolute link:   [[/Animal/Canine]]
Link to parent:  [[..]]
Link to sibling: [[../Feline]]
Link to child:   [[Bulldog]]

Or, from above:
Going from Animal.Canine to Animal.Feline: [[..Feline]]
Going from Animal.Canine to Animal.Feline.Housecat: [[..Feline.Housecat]]
Going from Animal.Canine to Animal.Canine.Terrier: [[Terrier]].

> The other problem is that it presumes that authors know in advance
> which pages are going to be groups, or that converting a leaf page
> into a group requires a fair bit of editing and adjustment to its
> contents (which seems un-wiki-like to me).

This seems to be at the crux of the difficulty in implementing hierarchical groups. For it to work intuitively all pages need to behave the same, no leaf pages. Looking at a page is just the same as looking at the index.html file in a given directory. Every page is equivalent to a folder containing an index.html file. It may contain other folders and other pages are referenced the same way you would reference other folders in a directory structure.

I'm not saying this would be a good thing. I am quite happy with PmWiki just the way it is in this respect. And, I don't doubt it would be a major job to make such a change. Finally, it is quite possible that I have not thought this out far enough to see an obvious error. The main thing that prompted me to post was the syntax of the previously proposed references. The suggestion shown at the top is not the same as references in a directory structure. I think that is why it seems odd/annoying.

-Dan





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