There's a new RFC page up on the wiki: http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Drop_actions_in_favor_of_spec...
...can't figure out how I would summarize it here so I'll let the RFC page speak for itself.
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 3:13 AM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
There's a new RFC page up on the wiki: http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Drop_actions_in_favor_of_spec...
...can't figure out how I would summarize it here so I'll let the RFC page speak for itself.
Thanks for writing this up. I've added a few quick comments and put it on my watchlist.
I *hate* action urls. They overly complicate Article and related classes, and date from a time before special pages existed. While on the one hand I think the cleanup recently to make Action classes and move the code out was a positive thing...I agree the better course of action is to kill them entirely. Of course, things like action=edit should work as back-compat for near eternity (supporting action=foobar redirects to Special:Foobar/Title would take very little code).
-Chad
On 31 August 2011 15:32, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
I *hate* action urls. They overly complicate Article and related classes, and date from a time before special pages existed. While on the one hand I think the cleanup recently to make Action classes and move the code out was a positive thing...I agree the better course of action is to kill them entirely. Of course, things like action=edit should work as back-compat for near eternity (supporting action=foobar redirects to Special:Foobar/Title would take very little code).
We should probably be commenting on the wiki, but I'm at work at the moment and this is quicker. While it may well be true that special pages are better from a programming point of view, I much prefer action urls from a user point of view. I quite often get to pages by modifying urls rather than clicking links (why load an article before editing it when you can go straight to the edit page?) and I find it much easier to do that with action urls than special pages. If nothing else, it means the edit page and the article page are next to each other in the alphabetical list of recently viewed pages that appears when I start typing.
On 11-08-31 09:02 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
On 31 August 2011 15:32, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
I *hate* action urls. They overly complicate Article and related classes, and date from a time before special pages existed. While on the one hand I think the cleanup recently to make Action classes and move the code out was a positive thing...I agree the better course of action is to kill them entirely. Of course, things like action=edit should work as back-compat for near eternity (supporting action=foobar redirects to Special:Foobar/Title would take very little code).
We should probably be commenting on the wiki, but I'm at work at the moment and this is quicker. While it may well be true that special pages are better from a programming point of view, I much prefer action urls from a user point of view. I quite often get to pages by modifying urls rather than clicking links (why load an article before editing it when you can go straight to the edit page?) and I find it much easier to do that with action urls than special pages. If nothing else, it means the edit page and the article page are next to each other in the alphabetical list of recently viewed pages that appears when I start typing.
And that's one of the reasons why my proposal preserves the use of action urls and makes them and special pages one and the same.
I considered the arguments pro-action and pro-specialpages when I wrote this up and took them all into account.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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