[Wikitext-l] Double-bracketed external links

[Steve Bennett]

On 11/27/07, Platonides <platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would fit the expectatives. It's a commons mistake among beginners.
> However, not only they have a different syntax for brackets, also for
> separators. So if you "fixed" it, you could end up making a link as <a
> href="http://www.example.org/|Nice">site</a>
> Also, it would further restrict available pagenames: Things like
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http://www.google.com *do* exist!

Yeah, and given that David says | characters exist in URL's, life is a
bit more complex. You could do something like this:

[[http://www.foo...]] - parsed like an internal link, | is a caption
separator, space is treated literally (or perhaps escaped as %20), the
full range of URLs is therefore not available (or perhaps with nowiki)
[http://www.foo...] - parsed as at present, space is a separator, | is literal.
http://www.foo - parsed as at present, space is the end of the URL, |
is literal.

Hmph, too much complexity for too little gain. Probably better just to
warn the user (oops, did I say warn? I meant, give encouraging advice
to) at the time they commit the error (I mean, expressed their intent
using syntax we unfortunately don't support).


> It is however an interesting proposal, as you wouldn't need to recognise
> [http:// links at all. You would simply define http: as a special
> namespace linking to that page (same with ftp:, mailto:...).

Eep.

Steve