What I'm saying is this:
Title's supporting various bits of text and other such stuff is not a small thing, it's a feature and issue which has been around for awhile and is something that a large number of people are involved in. What one developer things is a way to solve the issue may not be what others may think, and it may not even be the best way.
What I'm saying is, that with something with as large an involvement as this, rather than one dev making a small change to how things worked, we should get input from many of those who are involved on what is needed, and what is the best way to go about it all.
And I'm not saying that adding the extension functionality is something for you to do in addition. I'm saying that this could be best done as multiple people working on different parts at the same time, and making sure that the different parts are compatible with each other and work cleanly instead of someone making a big hack later (Isn't changing a small bit of functionality at one point and a hack needing to be created later the whole reason we got into this whole big DISPLAYTITLE mess in the first place? Repeating the past isn't good). I'm even fine with being the one to do the extension stuff, while working with you to make sure both our changes work together rather than breaking each other, or locking the others features out and limiting people to pick between.
Next, I'm not saying that both things coincide. In fact, we've been talking in the notion that there are two types of titles, while ignoring what's really there. There are three types of titles. * Title key - keeps the complete normalized form. Used for uniqueness checking, finding things, and such. * Real title - keeps information on what the real padding, case, and characters are actually inside of the title. Used in clean display of the title and this is what is normalized to create the title key. * Display title - this is what we actually display to the user, rather than a bunch of technical limitations, the point is to make the display suit the reader's eyes and deliver a name in a understandable means. This may or may not be completely unique, and if it doesn't normalize to the title key like the real title does, then some notification should be added to make sure that bad links aren't created. In fact, rather than just "Link with: Foo", we could output something like "Link with: [[Foo|'''F'''oo]]" which considers limited parts of the displaytitle (only italic and bold should be considered if markup is allowed) as well as the real title to create proper links that can actually be used in the best manor.
The key and display title I've been talking about is the key and display to the user, what you've been talking about is actually the key and the real title of the article. We should be considering key (backend use), real (inline display), and display (title header display) rather than just two of the three.
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of: -The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com) -Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) -and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)