On 11/24/06, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Edward Z. Yang wrote:
I did quite a bit of thinking on what you posted here, and some of it quite fabulous. I still have a few questions:
- If you had to rename every message in MediaWiki, would you have
enforced a definite naming convention? Namespaced them?
Sure, I would have a naming convention. We've already more or less standardised on using prefixes for extension messages. Namespaces for core messages would probably be useful too. My main bugbear with the current system is punctuation style: Lee used strings of unbroken lowercase letters, which I think is hard to read. They're always quoted, so why not have spaces between words? Or underscores, if that's too progressive.
Someone suggested on IRC once that something might break if we use spaces, because the message names also serve as page names and maybe whatever creates the pages will expect underscores. I usually use hyphens, myself . . . I find them less obtrusive and easier to type than underscores.