On Apr 7, 2005 5:16 AM, Kynnin Scott <kynnins(a)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]