[pmwiki-users] Making a domain name a wiki page

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Sat, 27 May 2006, Thomas -Balu- Walter wrote:

> On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 11:46:43PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>> On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 10:29:24PM -0500, Roj Niyogi wrote:
>>> Hi there:
>>>
>>> I'm working on a Web Hosting related wiki called WebHostWiki at
>>> http://www.webhostwiki.com.  I'm having some trouble making a company's
>>> domain name a wiki page.  For example if I put [[VARhosting.net]], it
>>> creates VARhosting as the group and Net as the page.  I want
>>> "VARhosting.net" to be the page.  Is this possible?
>>
>> At present page names aren't allowed to contain dots -- just
>> letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores.  The dot and slash
>> are always taken to be group separators.
>
> Is there a way to have "priorities" regarding dot and slash? E.g. I think
> that pages with a slash in it's name are less common than ones with a
> dot. So if I link to ReleaseInfos/pmwiki-x.x.x pmwiki identifies the /
> as the separator and allows the . in the pagename?
>
> This would be hard to explain to users though I'm afraid.

Or we could stop using '.' [1] to separate the group and the page? Before 
the lynch mob gathers, consider the original difference of '.' and '/':

 	Markup			Link text		Target
 	SomePage		SomePage		{$Group}/SomePage
 	PmWiki/SomePage		SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage
 	PmWiki.SomePage		PmWiki.SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage

Since we are now using [[..]] that allows (...) inside them, today we can 
do the following:

 	Markup			Link text		Target
 	[[SomePage]]		SomePage		{$Group}/SomePage
 	[[PmWiki/SomePage]]	SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage
 	[[(PmWiki/)SomePage]]	SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage
 	[[PmWiki.SomePage]]	PmWiki.SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage
 	[[(PmWiki.)SomePage]]	SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage

I've verified this here:
 	http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/LinksToSomePage

I now argue that links to other groups, where you *don't* want the name of 
the group to be shown, are not so frequent that we need to distinguish 
between '.' and '/' for this purpose. Since these links are less frequent, 
it's not that much of a problem for the author to write [[(group/)page]] 
instead of the old [[group/page]] v.s. [[group.page]].

So what if we now made things *simpler* [2] by removing the use of '.' 
between group and page name, and only let these alternatives remain:

 	Markup			Link text		Target
 	[[SomePage]]		SomePage		{$Group}/SomePage
 	[[PmWiki/SomePage]]	PmWiki/SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage
 	[[(PmWiki/)SomePage]]	SomePage		PmWiki/SomePage

If I had this available as a cookbook recipe I'd implement it for at least 
two wiki installations at once.

/Christian

[1] - I would greatly prefer keeping '/' and skipping '.' because:
 	1. I'm used to URIs and filepaths etc using '/' as a separator
 	2. It's much more common that I want '.' in a page name compared
            to '/'.

[2] - It is simpler because there are now less alternative ways of doing
       the same thing. According to a co-worker this definitely makes it
       easier for new users. I think he has a point here...

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr