On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 11:00:39AM +1000, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 10/25/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com>
wrote:
I'd like to recommend that anyone who thinks
aliases are a Pretty Neat
Idea go locate some coverage of the Come From statement in the
programming language Intercal, and muse upon the potential
similarities.
Heh, the thought occurred to me too. However, in Intercal, the chaos
arises from a program in execution unexpectedly and suddenly leaping from
any point in the code to an arbitrary and
unconnected function. In this proposal, the leaping always takes
place at exactly the same point: when a user has entered a query, and
that query has not matched the name of an actual page in the database.
Sure, but my point is more that "It's Magic!".
Magic violates the Priciple of Least Astonishment.
Then again, I hadn't thought through the behaviour
of what happens when you
[[link]] to an aliased term. Logically the behaviour ought to be:
- If a real page exists, link to that
- Otherwise, if a single alias matches, link to that.
- Otherwise, link to an automatic disambiguation page.
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.
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:?
Similarly, if a user links to [[John X Smith]], but
the actual page is
[[John Xavier Smith]] with an alias, what should happen exactly?
Well, that's the same question as "What happens with redirects now",
which I'm always on the wrong side of; right?
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?
- does it work in other namespaces? Which namespace
does the alias apply
in? Does this mean that [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] cannot have a
line like #ALIASES WP:NOT ? If aliases are applied in the main namespace,
how do we stop people using them in user pages etc?
Yeah; there are *lots* of potential pitfalls, aren't there?
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?
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
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