[pmwiki-users] Re: View action not active

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Sep 14 13:55:49 CDT 2005


On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:16:34PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 
> And we have to ask if there are other factors besides actions that 
> need to be tested as well ...
> I think I can add a capability to truly detect self-links, as long
> as we can decide with some degree of precision what constitutes a
> "real" self-link.

To better understand my comment, here's a "real-world" example
that we may be able to use for discussion.

If I go to http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/Tabs, then many people
will claim that the "View" action references the current page, and
therefore should not generate a link back to the current page.  
No problem, I can understand that.

Clicking on the "Edit" tab takes me to
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/Tabs?action=edit.  Now then, the
"View" tab goes to somewhere "different", and so it should not be
a link.  Okay, but how about the "Edit" tab?  Is it to be considered
a self-reference and not turned into a link (like the "View" tab was
when we viewed the page), or should it remain a link?

If you answer that "Edit" should not be a link here, then what do we 
do with something like the following, where the author is creating a
new page from a template?

  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/Foo?action=edit&template=Cookbook.Template

Now then, should the "Edit" action generate a link?  Note that the Edit
action actually causes something different to happen from the current
page.

I see at least two answers to the above (I suspect and hope there 
are others):
  1. Compare all values of the url to determine if a link is a
     self-reference.
  2. Only compare page names and actions to determine if a link is a
     self-reference.

I see advantages and disadvantages to both of the above.  If we
compare entire urls (#1), then many things that people will claim
are "self-references" won't be because of small differences in the url.

If we compare only page names and actions (#2), then a url that actually
results in a different view of the page (e.g., in things such as 
breakpage and search) can easily be treated as a self-reference (and thus
not a link) when it arguably shouldn't be.  This becomes particularly 
tricky when considering links like:

   [[{$Name}]]
   [[{$Name}?skin=light]]
   [[{$Name}?setview=admin]]

All three of the above markups generate what #2 would consider
to be self-referencing links (i.e., they link to the current
page with $action == 'browse'), but clearly we still want these
"self-referencing links" to continue to be displayed as such.

Pm




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