On 8/7/06, Steve Bennett stevage@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?