[pmwiki-users] page actions when viewing a nonexistent page

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Feb 9 14:20:39 CST 2006


On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 11:55:28AM -0600, Jon Haupt wrote:
> On 2/9/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 02:34:21PM -0600, Jon Haupt wrote:
> > >    I'm not sure if this is a bug report or a feature request, but it'd be
> > >    nice if at least there was some way to specify to the link engine that I
> > >    didn't want to rewrite ?action=whatever to ?action=edit just because the
> > >    page doesn't exist.
> >
> > 1.  It'd be a feature request; but I don't have any problem with
> >     modifying the page link engine so that it doesn't add ?action=edit
> >     for non-existent pages if a query string is already specified.
> 
> That seems like something we'd want to vote on because there are
> stated advantages to having the page action changed when the action
> couldn't be carried out (as in print).  I'll make a PITS entry.

I'm thinking it might not be that big of an advantage to keep the current
behavior, even in select cases.

If someone hits ?action=print on a non-existent page they'll get the 
404 Page Not Found message (formatted for printing), which seems 
reasonable.  It's at least as reasonable as showing the edit form
(probably more so if edit passwords are in place).

For ?action=diff they'll see an empty history, which also seems okay.
We could even see about having ?action=diff on non-existent pages
returning 404 Page Not Found.

For all of the other actions, honoring the link author's designation
of the action to use seems like the appropriate thing to do.  So,
I'm thinking we should just say that a query string on a page link
target means the link is always formatted as an existing page.

This would also have the very nice side effect of eliminating the
question marks that appear on the action links in the upper-right
corner when arriving at a non-existent page (instead of doing it 
through CSS, as most skins are currently doing).

Pm




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