On 8/7/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote:
*From the same page, text like this would actually
work: "ISBN
0312174403 / 0-312-17440-3". It's actually a good example of where an
{{ISBN}} template would actually be useful: you could make that second
number a link, which currently it isn't, because it's not directly
preceded by the magic word.
Well, you can still make it a link manually, you know. Templates
aren't going to *improve* that.
* The syntax of MediaWiki would be reduced that little
bit more,
making compatibility with other wiki's easier, and making parsing it
easier. Again, pretty minor considering that there's no huge loss for
any wiki that doesn't support magic ISBN's - but if we implemented
them as templates, they'd get them for free.
That's certainly true, but very minor. Once we get a formal grammar
pinned down, anyone could easily implement a parser based on it.
* With parser functions, we could actually attempt to
validate the
ISBN's rather than passing them blindly. According to
[[:en:International Standard Book Number]], they should be either 10
or 13 digits long, and have a checksum. Our magic word accepts "1" as
a "valid" ISBN.
That would be *hell* to do with parser functions, if it's even
possible (I can't see how it is without string functions). It would
be very simple in PHP.
Basically, all the logic about ISBN's is
apparently hardcoded into
MediaWiki, which is a pretty awful place for it, when you think about
it.
I agree that a wiki concept is probably better, but a) that's possible
already; you could make the templates yourself if you want to fill in
gaps and b) maybe we should think about extending the current syntax
to parse more ID-type things, rather than removing the parsing we
already have going on. If anyone has a useful ID format to share, why
not add it as an option for installers? Maybe move this all to an
extension?