kelvSYC wrote:
What I'd like to see is subpages fulfilling that purpose. Given [[Template:foo]] with contents {{{bar}}}, What I'd like to see is for MediaWiki to, when instantiated without specifying what {{{bar}}} should be:
- first check if [[Template:foo/bar]] exists (yes, this would mean that
forward slashes can't be part of a template name...) and replace {{{bar}}} with the contents if it does
This is a very bad idea, performance-wise. It is *much* more feasible to introduce a "default value" syntax:
{{{variablename|defaultvalue}}}
This way everything is in one place (one page in the Template namespace) and there is no extra database query involved which would only serve to slow everything down.
Oh, and... the current behaviour that {{{bar}}} is replaced with {<contents of [[bar]]>} if "bar" isn't defined is a bug, or it should be considered one. {{{bar}}} should be a syntactical element that is logically different and independent of {{blah}}. But that's my personal opinion.
Timwi