On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 01:57, Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 01:39:17AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
It's unclear to me what it would entail to 'make the namespace en_Talk'. The link syntax is [[Talk:Foo]] (if in the en language section) or [[en:Talk:Foo]] (fully qualified or from another section), and you're talking about a URL that is named differently. Is the 'en_' prefix just a shorthand for squishing language and namespace into one database field?
To answer your question: yes.
Which raises the question of what purpose the tag serves? We still have to distinguish languages and classes of namespaces, which means either constantly parsing that tag into two pieces or constantly referencing a namespace table with entries like: "en_Talk" -> "en", "Talk", NSCLASS_TALK
But here is a question *I* should have asked ages ago: what constraints should be put on page titles? None whatsoever?
At present the following characters are allowed in titles: [-,.()' &;%!?_0-9A-Za-z/:\x80-\xFF]
This means the following ASCII chars are _not_ allowed: \x00-\x1f (control codes, must not use) " double quote # hash $ dollar * ampersand + plus < less than = equals
greater than
[ ] brackets (reserved for links, must not use) \ backslash ^ caret { } curly braces | pipe (reserved for links, must not use) ~ tilde
Some of these are illegal or special in URLs, but they can of course be hex-encoded as high characters and ampersands are.
(And of course underscore and space are folded together; internally underscore is used, and prefered in URLs; spaces are used for display and preferred in text and wikilinks.)
You may not like letting namespaces be separated with a slash, but I believe most people do feel comfortable with the convention of making the language go first, and be separated with a slash.
Heck, I suggested that myself: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration
Also, is Talk:en:Foo valid? I hope it isn't.
It might pass the parser at the moment, but it probably shouldn't.
Can we abolish use of ':' in page titles so that it is totally reserved for languages and namespaces?
We explicitly decided to enable it a few months ago because it's very common in titles of works -- [[Three Colors: Blue]] [[2001: A Space Odyssey]] etc
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)