On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 22:20:37 +0100, Tomer Chachamu the.r3m0t@gmail.com wrote:
example doesn't look very "connected" to the link syntax. Enclosing tildes, like ~[[Template:Box]]~, might be better as well; of course, you'd have people wondering why ~[[User:IMSoP/foo]]~ didn't do anything...
No you wouldn't. The whole point of including "Template:" in the syntax is to make it really obvious how to transclude *other* namespaces.
No, you were suggesting we replace [or could have developed in the first place] the {{...}} syntax, which transcludes arbitrary pages, with a "magic link" behaviour for Template: pages. This, by definition, would limit transclusion to pages in the Template namespace (unless a completely different syntax was available in parallel, which behaved more like the current one).
The ~[[...]] substitution syntax, or so I assumed, was to go with that "magic link" system -- if you're not replacing {{...}}, why would you replace {{subst:...}}? -- and therefore that too logically only applies to [[Template:...]] pages. A feature that allowed you to *substitute* any page, but only *transclude* those in the Template namespace, would be just plain bizarre (even, indeed especially, if a completely different syntax allowed you to do the full range of transclusions)
To "make it really obvious how to transclude *other* namespaces", you'd keep exactly the syntax we have now, but remove the behaviour that makes it default to the Template namespace. That's not even a very complex change, code-wise, although it would break a hell of a lot of existing content, obviously.