[Wikitext-l] Newlines in link captions

[Samuel Henderson]

I doubt if anyone is using this feature intentionally, but many of us have
benefited from it unintentionally.  When an image caption is generated by a
template, particularly a large & complex template, it often ends up with a
lot of unexpected whitespace inside.  I'm not saying this is good, or that
those templates couldn't be better-written... however, open wikis being what
they are, IMO the current approach makes sense.

-- Sam / Visviva

On Dec 4, 2007 8:49 AM, Jared Williams <jared.williams1 at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: wikitext-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> > [mailto:wikitext-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
> > Steve Bennett
> > Sent: 03 December 2007 23:09
> > To: Wikitext-l
> > Subject: [Wikitext-l] Newlines in link captions
> >
> > I'm surprised to discover that this works:
> >
> > ----
> > [[Foo|
> >
> > blah
> >
> > blah]]
> > ----
> >
> > And so does this:
> >
> > ----
> > [[Image:foo.jpg|
> >
> > blah
> >
> > |
> >
> > thumb
> >
> > ]]
> > ----
> >
> > And even:
> > ----
> > [[image:foo.jpg|
> >
> >                                   some text over here|thumb
> > ]]
> > ----
> >
> > And even more annoyingly:
> > ----
> > [[Link|
> >
> > ***This is not a list
> >
> > ]]
> > ----
> >
> > In all these cases all the newlines in link or image captions are
> > collapsed down to a single whitespace.
> >
> > So, the usual questions arise:
> > 1. Does anyone know about, let alone use, this feature?
> > 2. Is it useful?
> > 3. Would anyone mind if it was gone?
> >
> > My concerns are:
> > 1. Lines that look like lists or space-indented text may not be (which
> > reduces the number of ways you can parse the text)
> > 2. The behaviour of newlines is different from normal text (normally 2
> > newlines in a row would give you a paragraph break)
> > 3. The behaviour of newlines is different before and after
> > the first pipe.
> >
>
> That causes schema violations for the current parser, if don't have tidy
> repairing.
>
> [[Link|
> ==h2==
> ----hr
> ]]
>
> Jared
>
>
>
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