Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/14/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
a) It hard redirects you, and there's absolutely no link back to where you came from. Very bad for maintenance, working on the redirect itself etc. b) It redirects you, but leaves the link back to the original redirecting page.
or (c) It hard redirects you, and there's a link back to where you came from.
Ok, what do "hard direct" and "soft redirect" mean in this context exactly? Let's take some page A which redirects to page B. They're hosted directly at wiki.org.
Currently wiki.org/A shows the content of wiki.org/B, but with a link back to A. The URL shows wiki.org/A.
You're proposing that wiki.org/A force a (server-side?) redirect to wiki.org/B, display the content of B, with a link back to A, and yet the URL shows wiki.org/B? The question is, how does MediaWiki know to show the link back if the URL is only wiki.org/B, and not wiki.org/B&red=A or something?
My personally preferred way is to simply redirect to B, and at the same time make it much easier than currently to get a list of "what redirects here" (and whatever other subsets of "what links here" you can imagine). Thus, the answer to your question is: You get the link to A because A redirects to B and you get the list of all titles that redirect to B.
Forgive my ignorance, I have absolutely no idea how server side redirects work.
The term "server-side" is a bit misleading here. Even the term "redirect" is confusing because what _MediaWiki_ calls a "redirect" is not actually a HTTP or HTML redirect at all.
The thing you get when you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/Article (i.e. with the /wiki missing) is an HTML redirect or "soft redirect", i.e. a <meta> tag that redirects after a set number of seconds.
The thing you get when you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/article (notice the lower-case "a") is an HTTP redirect or "hard redirect", i.e. an HTTP response with status code "301" and a Location header.
The thing you get when you go to a page title that is a MediaWiki redirect, is a pageview. ;-)
Timwi