On thing that annoys me about mediawiki is that I'll sometimes follow
a link only to discover that the link is just a redirect to a page
that I've read already.
Would it be so terrible to resolve redirects at parse time so that the
destination bar in my browser (and the link coloring) reflect the
redirect target?
This would have some caching interaction— changes to redirects
wouldn't be effective until the linking pages were re-parsed... of
course, work queue entries could be created... and the harm caused by
this could be mitigated by using a priority tracking and event-merging
work-queue. (I have no clue if such a beast is being used today...)
Another alternative would be adding no-op material to the URL: I.e.
http://site/redirectname#Redirect-to-targetname though this wouldn't
solve the link coloring and would inhibit any support to linking to
real anchors in these cases. The destination could also be displayed
using some kind of tool-tip on the link which also has the link
coloring weakness but would still be helpful.
Thoughts?