[Pmwiki-users] permanent links (was: Disabling WikiWords for a page)

[Neil Herber]

At 2005-01-13  11:43 AM -0700, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
>On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 05:11:10PM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> >
> > I want the best of both worlds. I was calling them "permanent links" but I
> > don't think that is the best nomencalture. I want to be able to declare a
> > word and have it rendered as a link whenever it appears.
>
>I don't have a problem with adding this sort of capability into
>intermap.txt and localmap.txt (which is likely where such mappings
>belong), but we need a easy way to mark which ones are the traditional
>InterMap links (requiring the colon) versus the new meanings.  And
>it should probably be backwards-compatible; i.e., it shouldn't require
>sites to have to update their existing localmap.txt files.

Since current InterMap tables look like this:

ISBN            http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/

I would suggest prefixing, suffixing, or enclosing the left hand term with 
some delimiters to indicate that it is a "permanent link". I would  choose 
amongst prefix, suffix, and enclose based on whatever looks the most 
"natural" and is the easiest to implement.

For example, if I want the word "Neil" to always link to the page 
Profiles.NeilHerber, then I could write one of:

perm[Neil]      Profiles.NeilHerber
[Neil]          Profiles.NeilHerber
(:Neil:)                Profiles.NeilHerber
<href>Neil      Profiles.NeilHerber
Neil>           Profiles.NeilHerber

External permanent links would use the same syntax, but with a full URL as in:

Adobe>  http://www.adobe.com/

There would not be any need for permanent links to perform argument 
substitution as in:

Jargon          http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/$1.html

because if you are creating complex URLs like this, then the existing 
InterMap works.

-----
Concerns/questions:

This would seem to be easy to do for single words, but what about phrases?

Adobe Acrobat Reader>   http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

If I had already defined "Adobe>" as a permanent link, it would be 
convenient if an InterMap-style reference worked too, as in 
"Adobe:products/acrobat/readstep2.html". The work around for this would be 
to have 2 entries: one a normal InterMap link and the other a permanent 
link. That is assuming that PmWiki can handle "duplicate" entries in the 
left column.

I would like to find a better name than "permanent link". All suggestions 
welcome.

Should I make this a PITS request? I can't see any current entries that 
seem to cover it.


Neil

Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668