Hey, thanks for the instructional reply. That's what I've liked about this list since joining: there's always something new to learn by just keeping up with the traffic.

Yeah, given the hairiness of that kind of approach to rendering, I agree it's insignificant beside the potential for breakage.

Kynnin S

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005 12:56:45 0100 rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:

On Apr 7, 2005 5:16 AM, Kynnin Scott kynnins@sfu.ca wrote:

...

I noticed this behaviour in someone else's edit. It appears that they

had

...

habitually wikified a term despite the fact that they were including

it as

...

the text of an external link. I realise this shouldn't be supported,

but the

...

behaviour that it exhibits should probably be considered as not

"doing the

...

right thing".

Hm, yes, that is odd behaviour, and definitely a bug, but it's tempting to just say we won't try and fix it. My reasoning is that there's no meaningful use for that combination of markup, unless somebody really really wanted the text "[[...]]" in their link caption, which seems like something they could do without really.

...

This doesn't really break anything or pose any security issues (that

I can

...

think of), but the code handling wikitext rendering should probably

not try

...

to wikify double-square-bracket-delineated text in external links

anyway.

The problem is that the code that does that is tortuous enough as it is, in order to deal with exactly that kind of context-specific behaviour. Every now and then, someone shifts it around, and new things break; if they're major, that leads to yet more shifting around; repeat...

For those that haven't looked deep into the code, it's very tempting to think of the code as "knowing where it is", and doing things differently inside or outside certain markup; but actually it performs one step for every instance of, say, internal links, in the whole text, and then goes back and does something else. So things like this have to be dealt with by doing things in the right order, stripping bits of text out and putting them back later, and all sorts of odd tricks like that. My suspicion is that fixing this without breaking anything else would be a pretty major challenge.

-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP] _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l