On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 00:47, Jonathan Walther wrote: (language links & inline appearance)
Ok, that makes sense. I had intended for language links to also be inline, unless they were at the very top of the page (somewhat like with #REDIRECT). Any objections to doing it that way?
Sounds nice; a link vanishing from the middle of the text is confusing, but the edges are where 'magic' can be reasonably expected to take place. Note that a few pages have the lang links stuck at the bottom instead of the top, and whitespace is common.
WikiName:ArticleTitle is the standard interwiki link syntax; the language codes are just abbreviated forms of the wiki name.
How so?
"de:Deutschland" is shorter and more site-specific than "DeWikiPedia:Deutschland", but functionally the same (seeing the special prefix, we use a stored URL associated with the prefix and slap the remainder of the title onto the end of the URL as an external link, instead of treating it as an internal wiki link - ie checking for page existence, linking to our own server, using an edit link form if the page doesn't exist).
That we sometimes move the link to the top of the screen and name it for the language is just a UI matter.
Yes, I am wondering why we use [[]] for wiki links, and [] for URL's proper.
Historical cruft; our wikicode syntax is largely inherited from UseModWiki. I think the freelink syntax ([[foo|bar]]) was added after the single-bracket named URL links; the space isn't usable as the separator for free links since they can contain spaces in the link portion.
Actually, I am not wondering. It is a useful syntactic aid to parsing. If only the pipe '|' syntax for [] was the same as [[]], that would be great. Any objections?
The space should be maintained for compatibility, but allowing the pipe to work as expected would be a very good thing. At that point, using double brackets would give a working link with an extra pair brackets around it; though some find that annoying. I would prefer having the double-brackets work 'as expected'.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)