At 2002-08-07 04:33 -0700, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
I think it should be dropped too. It's such a small convenience and confusing to newcomers. It's really not very difficult to type [[George W. Bush|Bush]], and it's easy for a newbie to see how it works.
I agree.
Another thing I'd like to see is the '|' replaced by tokens like '<-' and '->' or '<' and '>'. The '|' suggests in most languages that the parts at both end are equal in function and that it is either the on or the other. I also have trouble remembering which is the part that goes into the text and which the name of the page that it is linked to. It would have designed it the other way round. I would first like to write what I wanted to write and then bother with what it is linked to. The current order is probably based on the HTML syntax: <a href="George W. Bush">Bush</a> but I don't see that as a valid reason. In my prefered syntax it would become: [[Bush->George W. Bush]] (prefered) or [[George W. Bush<-Bush]]
I also wrote a language to code my site in and the linking of words is mainly done automatically, so 'Bush' would always be linked to an article called 'Bush' if it would exist. To be able to link combinations of words I use ``, the quotes that I don't normally use in any text. It just functions to indicate which words belong together like in `George W. Bush`. This would then automatically link to an article called 'George W. Bush' if it existed. With a '$' after the term like: Bush$ or `George Bush`$. I indicate that a term should be defined here (but there are other ways too). With Bush| I would indicate that the term should not be linked here. For example in the article about Bush himself.
Here is an example of how this automatic linking turns out even when an email is added written by someone else: http://www.chipdir.org/proj/ It's very little work since the computer does it all automatically, but sometimes words are linked that shouldn't be.
I'm not suggesting that it's also a better way to do things in Wikipedia.
As regards tables. I can define tables in my language in several ways, like:
table border=1 tr td width=50% - text for entry00 td - text for entry01 tr td - text for entry10 td - text for entry11
this can be abbreviated to:
table border=1 row - text for entry00 - text for entry01 row - text for entry10 - text for entry11
or even
table border=1 ^ text for entry00 ^ text for entry01 ^ text for entry10 ^ text for entry11
About my site: I started it (and it's language) late 1994. It's about 35 Mbyte big (10 Mbyte zipped). It has 1000's of pages, mainly generated from lists of chips etc. There are 30 voluntary mirror sites and it's visited by about 100,000 unique visitors per month who each look at about three pages. I live from the ad revenues.
Greetings, Jaap