[pmwiki-users] hierarchical groups, revisited

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 06:11:09PM +0100, Américo Albuquerque wrote:
>  > > The root of the confusion is that the filesystem analogy breaks 
> down at
>  > > this point. In a file system, a directory doesn't double as a file; in
>  > > PmWiki, a group doubles as a page.
>  >
>  > Exactly.
>
> Not so for urls. Using /somedir is the same as doing 
> /somedir/index.html. The same can be said about the PmWiki groups, 
> /Group would be the same as saying /Group/$GroupPage (whatever the 
> $GroupPage is). In a hierarchical page you would simply have a Group 
> named Animal that would have to have a homepage defined, be it Animal, 
> HomePage or any other name. [[Animal]] in it's sibling pages would 
> actually lead to [[Animal/$GroupPage]]

Actually, this doesn't quite work.  Suppose someone creates
a generic page about dogs called Animal.Canine (with no subpages).  
The Animal.Canine page contains links to other pages in the 
Animal group, such as [[Feline]] and [[Reptile]].

After this page is created (and has links to it from other places), 
someone decides that Animal.Canine should have subpages in it such as
Animal.Canine.Beagle and Animal.Canine.Terrier.  So, they create
Animal.Canine.$GroupPage to be the home page for the canine group.

What happens to the original Animal.Canine page?   We can't just
move its contents to Animal.Canine.$GroupPage, because then all of
its links will be broken.  And we can't say that /Animal/Canine
is the same as /Animal/Canine/$GroupPage, because then we don't
have a way to get to the contents of the original Animal.Canine page.

>  > Exactly. And I think filesystem syntax is too widespread and
>  > too far ingrained in the web itself for us to be able to dismiss it.
> Yes but there is some similarity with XML namespace syntax. XML elements 
> can have both  text (act as a page) and childs (act as a group)

Sure, but does XML support relative links between elements?

Pm