On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 7:37 PM, Mark Clements <gmane(a)kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
This is slightly different though. As the section
names are extensible, we
would be in a situation where every extension that is not in one of the
built-in section would need to include the interface text for it's section
heading. If two extensions in the same section differ in their default
text, which one has precedence? What happens if this section name is later
added to core? If extensions can just use a sensible English name knowin
that the default rendering is normally sufficient then it makes things a lot
easier to maintain, plus we still have the full flexibility of the
localisation system. Once this is in use, I envisage that sections that
have a sufficiently high number of common extensions in them will have
default labels added to core, even if core doesn't have any extensions in
that section itself.
I would say that maybe you should avoid such deliberate
decentralization and anarchy to begin with. Create a fixed list of
core categories, and provide a mechanism for extensions to add their
own if they have some reason (for instance, if they create many
special pages). The expectation should be that most extensions should
not consider adding any categories beyond the default, and those that
do should prefix the keys as usual to avoid conflict. It shouldn't be
focusing on each special page making up its own mind with special
provisions for things like some loner page deciding it wants to be in
its own category. Picture categorization by a single small group of
people in a unified fashion, with a few independent extensions needing
the ability to slightly expand on the groupings -- because that's the
reality, not a ton of independent pages that don't know about any of
the others.
To be honest, I added that in response to the e-mail,
where it seemed to be
desired functionality. I'm not sure how useful it would be in practice. I
will leave it out for now.
Makes sense. Too much flexibility can definitely be a bad thing: it's
always a tradeoff against uniformity and simplicity, which have their
own merits.