On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 00:53, Jonathan Walther wrote: [..]
Now, the urlprefix for Talk is the same. How do I say that it is an english language page? The normal, standard way to do this would be like so:
Hmm, I'm not a big fan of the slashes between namespace and title; Slashes imply a hierarchical path-like structure which certainly isn't there for talk pages.
That feels "right" to me. But doing that would require parsing the urlprefix for the namespace to figure out where to put in the language. I don't want to do that, and don't feel I should have to.
If you must do it that way, keying the url prefix table on language *and* namespace should do the trick.
If languages are namespaces it is easy: I can make the namespace en_Talk have an urlprefix of http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk
It's unclear to me what it would entail to 'make the namespace en_Talk'. The link syntax is [[Talk:Foo]] (if in the en language section) or [[en:Talk:Foo]] (fully qualified or from another section), and you're talking about a URL that is named differently. Is the 'en_' prefix just a shorthand for squishing language and namespace into one database field?
However, Brion, you've made a convincing case that we do need to know the language. I have no problem having another field for each namespace, giving that namespaces language to give to browsers.
Can you think of a better way to do this?
How does your proposal mark namespaces by functionality? (ie, given a talk page or user page in some language, how do I know it's a talk page [and should be linked to a subject page] or a user page [and should be linked to a contribs list], etc)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)