[pmwiki-users] Nested groups

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 09:55:36PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
> One of the problems that Pm mentioned was "no good default policies when 
> incomplete page names are given". 

I mentioned this...?  Hmm, I'm not sure why I would've said that.

> It occurred to me that such a policy isn't really required. Wiki pages 
> need not be restricted to sitting at leaves, they can also sit at 
> internal nodes. 

FWIW, we've been here in the discussion before -- having wiki
pages at internal nodes is itself not really a problem.
It's really the issue of relative links that poses the issue.

> Another one was "no good syntax for relative links". I have toyed with 
> various ideas, and found this:
> * It's a solved problem with path-like syntax (i.e.
>   /Main/HomePage is an absolut path, HomePage is a
>   relative path to a page on the same hierarchy level,
>   ../HomePage is the home page "one level up").

I don't think path-like syntax completely solves the problem.  
Let's suppose I'm on a page [...]/wiki/PmWiki/Variables, and I want to 
link from that page to [...]/wiki/PmWiki/Variables/Basic .
What do I use as the relative page reference?  How about the
reverse?

(The "standard" response to the first question is [[./Basic]].  
However, this *isn't* the path-like syntax that most people who work 
with urls and paths would expect.  For example, if I'm on a page at 
.../html/path/variable.html and that page contains an href to
"./basic.html", then I expect it to link to .../html/path/basic.html,
and not .../html/path/variable.html/basic.html.  So, [[./Basic]]
is *not* the path-like url syntax that most of us who write web pages
are used to.)

> Seems like the dot syntax should be deprecated, or replaced with 
> something else. (I'm in favor of deprecating it. Having two ways to 
> write the same thing just confuses people.)

I'm not against deprecating the dot syntax, but only if there's
something obviously better to replace it with.  At the moment
using dots for paths doesn't quite work for me.

Pm