At 09:56 AM 2/25/02 -0600, kband wrote:
From: <kband(a)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