At 09:56 AM 2/25/02 -0600, kband wrote:
From: kband@www.llamacom.com
Thus instead of the ":" being a reserved character anywhere in a title, only "user:", "talk:", "wikipedia:" etc. need to be reserved. Any other uses of colons should be fine. This will let us have entries for books with standard formatting of the subtitle (e.g., "The Muggles: A Tale of Woe") or other natural uses of the colon.
There is a simpeler solution. The actual contents of Wikipedia get the namespace "content:". If everything is prefixed with a namespace then the first colon is always the end of the namespace.
That's perfect.
Would this require us to explicitly put "content:" in front of every link?
If so, I doubt it would work--people would forget, because it's not intuitive.
It's not just not intuitive, it makes the user's life harder, and technology should work the other way around--put the burden on the programmers, not the users (editors).
Yeah, I realized this too a little later. It's immaterial from a user perspective what happens behind the stage; the problem is to match user practices with parsability.
Which gets us back to setting up standards for parsable colon usage, which is probably a mostly Wikitech-L issue, if we agree that it's worth it to try to find a way to make colons a (by and large) non-reserved character in titles (and I think we do).
-TC