On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 7:37 PM, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
This is slightly different though. As the section names are extensible, we would be in a situation where every extension that is not in one of the built-in section would need to include the interface text for it's section heading. If two extensions in the same section differ in their default text, which one has precedence? What happens if this section name is later added to core? If extensions can just use a sensible English name knowin that the default rendering is normally sufficient then it makes things a lot easier to maintain, plus we still have the full flexibility of the localisation system. Once this is in use, I envisage that sections that have a sufficiently high number of common extensions in them will have default labels added to core, even if core doesn't have any extensions in that section itself.
I would say that maybe you should avoid such deliberate decentralization and anarchy to begin with. Create a fixed list of core categories, and provide a mechanism for extensions to add their own if they have some reason (for instance, if they create many special pages). The expectation should be that most extensions should not consider adding any categories beyond the default, and those that do should prefix the keys as usual to avoid conflict. It shouldn't be focusing on each special page making up its own mind with special provisions for things like some loner page deciding it wants to be in its own category. Picture categorization by a single small group of people in a unified fashion, with a few independent extensions needing the ability to slightly expand on the groupings -- because that's the reality, not a ton of independent pages that don't know about any of the others.
To be honest, I added that in response to the e-mail, where it seemed to be desired functionality. I'm not sure how useful it would be in practice. I will leave it out for now.
Makes sense. Too much flexibility can definitely be a bad thing: it's always a tradeoff against uniformity and simplicity, which have their own merits.