On 11/15/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Yep. There's all sorts of reasons it's a bad idea. Take a look at this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
Here the RFC magic link is working to its full exent. But notice:
- Every RFC is linked, even the ones that are used more than once
- The RFC's are automatically linked like this: [http:... RFC
1234], rather than RFC 1234[http:...] or even RFC 1234<ref>http...</ref>
Having a piece of hardcoded parser magic dictate style and presentation over the Manula of Style is crappy. And that's in a best-case scenario. We have lots of other templates that do a similar job ({{imdb}} for instance), so it makes very little sense to me to give ISBN's, RFC's and PMID's (whatever they are) this special treatment.
</rant>
Would anyone object if I just deleted this functionality, so people could use templates like for everything else? Or would that be a little too drastic? As a historical thing, this stuff was introduced well before templates, I believe, and was subsequently obsoleted by them.