On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 20:56 +0100, Timwi wrote:
Article titles with a slash in them, such as [[History/edit]] if anyone ever wanted to create it, could be encoded using a double-slash:
http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit/edit http://en.wikipedia.org/History//edit/history
This is less alienating than "%28" for parentheses or "%2C" for commas, but of course one could always use "%2F" for slashes for consistency.
I'm not sure if there's a specific prohibition of this practice in any spec, but it does fight typical conventions, which is kind of a bad thing. For example, it appears that Apache throws away extra slashes, as can be seen here: http://apache.org///foundation////faq.html http://apache.org/foundation/faq.html
IIS seems to do the same thing: http://www.microsoft.com////windowsserversystem///default.mspx
Chances are there are going to be weird corner cases where the web server smarts interfere with what you want to do. While it seems like a simple enough problem to solve for the Wikipedia admin team, it's likely that such a convention would be difficult to support in a general MediaWiki install. Though there's no reason that WP can't have a custom, tricked-out config, it'd be nice if WP were running in a "recommended" configuration for MediaWiki.
URLs such as http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename/subpage would then redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename//subpage and you could still type a single slash as long as the subpage doesn't happen to be "edit", "history", or any of the other magic words.
Mixing subpages into the action namespace seems like a bad idea. Arguably its worse when its only the exception, because that means it'll be something that will always need to be accommodated, but rare enough that its often forgotten.
In the spirit of putting the action at the end, perhaps this syntax would work: http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=edit http://en.wikipedia.org/Pagename?action=history
It seems a little dicey from a future-proofing perspective to put the article names at the root, but there is an appeal to it as well. In order to avoid mixing functionality extensions into the article namespace, the extensions would either need to live in URL parameters or in the 'Special:' namespace (or other namespace).
Rob