From: "Uri Yanover" <uriyan_subscribe(a)yahoo.com>
> The gain is that the author has at edit time full
control over where the
> link points to. With runtime lookup a link might change because a
certain
> term was added to a certain namespace.
And, of course, as Lee already pointed out, it also makes it less tempting
for the casual user. A very important argument.
Well, that's not a bug but a feature! The term
will not be added
to a certain namespace if there isn't already some disrepancy
(and if the author means the other subject he will surely link
to it explicitly, like [[Root (Botanics)]]) By doing the linking
in runtime we could make sure that all links point at their
most updated targets, which is an advantage. This is similar
to the reason why we use redirects.
Perhaps the user wants this to happen, perhaps not. I suggest we first wait
and see how many people actually need such features.
As to runtime performance concerns, I'm sure that
caching and/or
an optimised parser could do wonders in the Wikipedia case.
Wiki markup is _very light_.
Have you seen the parsing code? There is nothing _very light_ about it, at
the moment. I intend to improve that in the future, but found some other
problems I would like to solve first. Anyway, adding non-trivial features is
not going to make that job easier.
Kind regards,
-- Jan Hidders