[pmwiki-users] Nested groups

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Thu Jun 2 14:55:36 CDT 2005


Hi all,

I had my thoughts drifting and had a flash of inspiration about nested 
group hierarchies that I'd like to share. (That particular inspiration 
may be helpful or not, I don't know - I still don't have a good grasp of 
the issues involved, I can only guess what the problems were.)

One of the problems that Pm mentioned was "no good default policies when 
incomplete page names are given". I interpret this to mean things like: 
if the URL is pmwiki.php?n=Cookbook, it will be redirected to 
pmwiki.php?n=Cookbook.Cookbook. There's no good way to extend that kind 
of policy to a hierarchical group structure.
It occurred to me that such a policy isn't really required. Wiki pages 
need not be restricted to sitting at leaves, they can also sit at 
internal nodes. I.e. there's no need at all to forward ?n=Cookbook 
anywhere else, simply let the page be named Cookbook and be done with 
it. This also makes it unnecessary to do redirects (which tend to 
complicate both the internal processing of PmWiki and the mental model 
of the visitor, so good riddance *g*).

Another one was "no good syntax for relative links". I have toyed with 
various ideas, and found this:
* It's a solved problem with path-like syntax (i.e.
   /Main/HomePage is an absolut path, HomePage is a
   relative path to a page on the same hierarchy level,
   ../HomePage is the home page "one level up").
* It doesn't work for dot syntax. Absolute path names like
   .Main.HomePage look silly, and people tend to overlook
   that tiny leading dot (this is a frequent source of errors
   in DNS records which use absolute and relative domain names
   with dots as separators).
   The .. convention will degenerate into dot-counting madness.
Seems like the dot syntax should be deprecated, or replaced with 
something else. (I'm in favor of deprecating it. Having two ways to 
write the same thing just confuses people.)

Regards,
Jo



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