On 11/9/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
For some obscure reason, the parser's behavior here is pretty weird as well. The suffix can only contain A-Za-z, nothing else. This means that:
Well then, should it just take everything until the next whitespace?
No, that's bad too, for this [[reason]]. Do you want
to link that last full stop? No? Why do you want to link the dot in [[Firefox 2]].0? Ok, so you want to link [[Brion]]'s apostrophe, but do you want to link a '[[quoting]]' apostrophe? Why not?
These types of syntax rules always run into grey area problems. Plural [[link]]s were a good but unless you can come up with a hard rule like "everything up until the next whitespace" as suggested you're always going to end up in this murky area.
Perhaps it would be better to have an unambiguous syntax like:
[[Link||ing]], [[Firefox 2||.0]], [[Brion||'s]] apostrophe etc. It's no wordier (save an extra pipe) than present. and you can exactly what is and isn't covered by the link. With a bit of effort we could even clean up the pipe trick:
[[Sydney|, Australia|]]. [[Nice| (programming language)|]]. Or something. Again, rather than relying on dodgy rules like detecting "(context)" and ", location", make the user specify it without ambiguity.
But I'm digressing a bit.
Steve