On Wed, Dec 25, 2002 at 11:32:50PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
The backend implementation is not relevant. By using mod_rewrite, the URL can be in any format we like with the PHP system. But that's no excuse for making URLs long, confusing, and fragile.
True. What I meant was that by bypassing mod_rewrite, we might no longer need a special patch for Apache?
http://foo/w/Whatlinkshere#ns=Special&target=A%26W+Root+Beer&limit=5...
Standard URL syntax provides for a query string (starting with "?"), we shouldn't be afraid to use it.
Ok. Let's say I have an article "Who Killed JFK?" and I want to view the articles history. I want to type in the URL, and I can't remember the hex code for '?'. What do I do? Just require people to use the hex code anyway for cases where the ? is part of the article title?
http://foo/w/Who_Killed_JFK??action=history&limit=10
Also, I'm not clear; what "escaping" does mod_rewrite do? How does it determine whether to escape the ? and & or not? When does it do the escaping?
So, if I put in the following URL:
http://foo/w/Who_Killed_JFK%3F?action=history
Will mod_rewrite change the second ? to a %3F if I rewrite the URL somehow? Will it transform the %3F to a ? if I rewrite the URL somehow?
I'd prefer: http://foo/en/Special:Whatlinkshere?target=A%26W+Root+Beer&limit=50
That's fair enough; do you have a page already written up giving your reasons for wanting languages to be part of a hierarchy, but not namespaces?
or, knowing that many special pages operate explicitly on a target, one could rearrange, folding most of them back into the already existing "action" sequence:
http://foo/en/A&W_Root_Beer?action=whatlinkshere&limit=50 http://foo/en/User:Billybob?action=contributions
I heartily approve and endorse that idea. If noone objects, I will implement it that way in mod_wiki
Or even yet, we could take advantage of the path syntax, as long as special pages are never named with slashes:
http://foo/en/Special:Whatlinkshere/A&W_Root_Beer?limit=50 http://foo/en/Special:Contributions/Billybob
I'm having difficulty understanding; could you show me what manglement would happen under other schemes, that doesn't happen under this one?
Remember, URLs should be human-readable and human-rememberable if possible; people *will* try to muck about with them manually. They *will* e-mail URLs to friends and colleagues. They *will* print them and send them to other people who will have to type them in. They *will* try to speak them over the phone. Non-ascii characters and special punctuation marks can be a pain for this, alas, but we should minimize the trouble we make in the basic syntax.
I think we are on the same page; I concur with everything you said in that previous paragraph.
Jonathan