Hi,
I'm not sure if this has been discussed yet, but I want to raise it just
in case it hasn't.
I like the proposal to make internal and external links use the same
markup because it is more consistent, but I worry about the treatment
of the ? character:
In the current syntax, it appears that the internal [[]] syntax encodes the
? character so that wiki pages can have the ? character in its name. While
the external [] syntax does not encode the ? character so that pages
that have the ? character in the URI still work (eg. cgi pages).
So in the new syntax, is the ? encoded or not? It would be nice if
it were possible for the author to force the character to be encoded
or not encoded.
I recently ran into a problem where I attempted to use interwiki
links to shorten URIs (some of them can be hopelessly long) only
to find that when I use the [[]] syntax, the ? becomes encoded
and so the URI becomes mangled and unusable. Because of this
behaviour I was unable to use the interwiki links the way I intended.
I wanted to use [[cvs:dir1/dir2/file?revision=1.3]] to link to
http://cvs.something.org/really-really-really-long/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/file?r…
but instead got:
http://cvs.something.org/really-really-really-long/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/file%3…
Which the cgi application couldn't accept.
So the treatment of the ? character is important because it has a special
meaning.
-John