On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 22:20:37 +0100, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t(a)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.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]