Mailing List Archive

Middle Earth redux
Back in January we had some discussion about how difficult it was to
edit multiple cross-linked pages about subjects within a context now
that subpages are gone. There were several suggestions, but none of
them really clicked and none were ever implemented. The issue has
come up again, and there are now more pages with disambiguating
contexts now, so I think now is a good time to revisit.

I also have a proposal that I like better than all the earlier
ones (including mine). Rather than add a special tag like Base
or Context, and rather than using a special character, let's
just change our interpretation of links with a missing portion
on either side of the pipe, that is [[ link| ]] and [[ |link]].

Here's the proposal: On pages whose titles end with (context) in
parentheses, [[ |link]] is interpreted as [[link (context)|link]].
On all pages, [[link (context)| ]] is interpreted that way as well.
All other uses of [[|link]] or [[|link]] are simply interpreted
as [[link]].

That will make fixing all the links in the Middle Earth, Poker,
and other pages much easier, and I don't think it will add any
temptation to over-categorize or cause other problems.

It is an open question whether these links are interpreted at
save-time or render-time; the latter makes things easier I think,
but the former has advantages too.
0
Re: Middle Earth redux [ In reply to ]
On 4/12/02 5:09 PM, "lcrocker@nupedia.com" <lcrocker@nupedia.com> wrote:
>
> Here's the proposal: On pages whose titles end with (context) in
> parentheses, [[ |link]] is interpreted as [[link (context)|link]].
> On all pages, [[link (context)| ]] is interpreted that way as well.
> All other uses of [[|link]] or [[|link]] are simply interpreted
> as [[link]].
>
> That will make fixing all the links in the Middle Earth, Poker,
> and other pages much easier, and I don't think it will add any
> temptation to over-categorize or cause other problems.
>
> It is an open question whether these links are interpreted at
> save-time or render-time; the latter makes things easier I think,
> but the former has advantages too.

Let me try to figure out exactly how that would work...

So if we change September_11,_2001_Terrorist Attack/Casualties
to Casualties_(September_11,_2001_Terrorist_Attack), then to
link to say Missing_(September_11,_2001_Terrorist_Attack) on the Casualties
page we write [[|Missing]], which is rendered as
<a href="Missing_(September_11,_2001_Terrorist_Attack)">Missing</a>.

If we didn't move the page, we could also add this functionality
so that on pages with a / the same thing happens, so that
on September_11,_2001_Terrorist Attack/Casualties, a link to
[[|Missing]] would go to September_11,_2001_Terrorist Attack/Missing.

Any of this would make life easier...