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

Sun May 28 10:39:57 CDT 2006

Hi Patrick

After reading your reply, I realized I should have phrased my suggestion 
more carefully. To be honest, I didn't expect you to consider it as a 
suggestion for something we would change now. Especially as I realize that 
it'd certainly have the potential to break a lot of sites.

For now I'd just like to discuss the suggestion from the point of view if 
think the change would be an improvement. If we find that it would help 
(by making things easier, resulting in a clearer syntax etc), then we 
could consider implementation issuses and wether the risk is to big. After 
that we could decide if we actually think it is worth it. So I'm 
definitely not assuming this is something that's easy to do...

On Sun, 28 May 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 02:50:10PM +0200, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>> Or we could stop using '.' [1] to separate the group and the page?
>> [...]
>> 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.
>
> I'm don't think I can accept the frequency argument on its face -- it 
> depends greatly on the site organization.  The whole reason I created 
> the '/' versus '.' distinction was because I had a large number of links 
> to pages in other groups where I wanted the group name to be suppressed. 
> As just one basic example, most of my SideBar links use the slash to 
> suppress the group (but '/' was introduced long before we had sidebars).

I guess you are right about for instance the sidebar often containing 
links to other groups. However, as in my experience the sidebar doesn't 
change that often I'd be fine with writing the two extra characters in

 	[[(PmWiki/)Documentation index]].

Then again, in your case maybe you were editing/adding new links to other 
groups so often that two more characters would be a nuiscance.

Anyway, when thinking about this again, I think that the most important 
reason for using just one of '.' and '/' is that it makes it easier to 
explain to a new author how to do things. It's simply easier to say 
something like:

 	* Use [[...]] for linking to other pages
 	* Within [[...]], use (..) to hide parts of the page name
 	  that you don't want to be shown as the link text.
 	* For a completely different link text, write something like
 		[[some page | link text]]

compared to having to say the above, and the also say something like

 	Oh, and in addition to using '/' you can use '.' and then
 	the name of the group isn't shown.

I like alternative ways of being able to do things, but unfortunately it's 
not always good for new authors :-(

In this context, I now also realize that it was probably a bad idea of me 
to suggest that we have both '[[link | link text]]' and '[[link text -> | 
link]]'.

>> 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:
>> [...]
>
> It's not just the linking syntax, we also have to see if this affects 
> the way pages are stored on disk (where '.' is used to delimit groups in 
> pagenames), and understand what impacts it might have on the loading and 
> naming of files in local/ and pub/css/ .

You are actually getting ahead of me here... But I have to say that the 
choice of separator between group and page name in the name of the file 
that stores the page can't be that big of a problem. Couldn't we use %1A 
or something to represent a '.' in the name of a page? I agree with you of 
course that before trying to do something like this, we'd have to think 
through all the consequences first. It is a major change I think.

>From an implementation point of view, maybe it'd be benefitial to consider 
something like this together with allowing spaces and/or underscores in 
page names?

> This isn't to say it can't be done, only that it's a non-trivial
> change, and has a strong potential to break a lot of sites.

Oh I definitely agree about this being non-trivial. In fact, it might be 
such a big change that even if we like it, it still shouldn't be 
introduced until PmWiki 3.0.

> I'm presuming that we wouldn't allow dots in group names, just page 
> names?

I haven't thought about that, but why wouldn't we want to allow that?
Let's say that I have several software versions, LyX 1.3, LyX 1.3.1 and so 
on and that I'd like each of them to get their own group? Actually, I'd 
probably call the groups LyXRevision1.3/ and LyXRevision1.3.1/ etc.
Then I could have pages such as:

 	[[LyX revision 1.3 / Bugs]]
 	[[LyX revision 1.3 / Installation tips]]
 	[[LyX revision 1.3.1 / Bugs]]
 	[[LyX revision 1.3.1 / Installation tips]]

Another possible reason to have a '.' in a group name could be if I'd like 
to create a group called 'Christian.Ridderström', i.e. similar to how I 
use christian.riddrstrom at gmail.com

None of these examples are real in the sense that I've felt an absolute 
need for them, but I think such cases can exist.

/Christian

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