On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 02:28:07PM +1000, Steve Bennett wrote:
Will those be
extensible, as category pages are? Based on the
disambigs *I've* seen, assuming you can *do* that automatically may not
be all that safe.
In what way are category pages extensible? You mean in the brief text
at the top? I was envisageing automatic
(probably better called dynamic) disambiguation pages as being completely
generated on the fly. If you wanted to tweak something, you would replace it
by a real disambiguation page. There are problems with this proposal.
This actually presents a few complexities, as
links themselves are stored
in
a links table, and would have to be updated if
the aliases change. It's
also
not clear whether the third case above should be
a red or blue link.
How is that handled with :Category:?
I'm not sure what analogy you're making exactly, but an interesting,
weird and possibly relevant thing does
happen with categories: linking to a category which contains articles, but
does not itself exist as a "page" shows as a red, but functional link.
Yep, that was what I was talking about. It's red unless someone's made
it "actually be a page" by putting content on it... even if there are
items there which you will see when you click the redlink.
Weirded me out the first time I noticed it.
Some other
issues that also occur to me:
- does template transclusion work on an alias?
If not, why not?
Would it work on a redirect? If so, why shouldn't it work on an alias?
Yeah, there's no problem transcluding {{clr}} which redirects to {{-}}. Why
not? Perhaps because the potential for damage (malicious or otherwise) is
greater.
Yeah; there are *lots* of potential pitfalls, aren't there?
Such was my instinct, yes. Takes me a while to back up those
instincts, sometimes, though...
Are they
design? Or merely implementation? Given that they don't seem
to be problems for redirects, I suspect they're implementation.
Is there a way to get the good parts of this idea while sticking with
redirects as the actual implementation?
I'll put my thinking cap on. There's a bit of a problem in terms of trying
to make whatever feature "fit in" with the existing MediaWiki feature set
and general look and feel, behaviour etc. Is it ok to break that by using
lots of javascript to list and edit redirects? Is it ok to write to a page
other than the one the user is looking at? Is it ok to pop open a new window
to facilitate the user editing multiple pages at once? Is it ok to generate
code for a disambiguation page and ask the user to review it?
My instinct on this one is "Installed Base". The basic structure of MW
is well known on a sufficiently wide scale that fundamental changes to
it -- which I feel this is -- merit fairly deep study.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
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