wikiword spacing, was: Re: [Pmwiki-users] pmwiki-2.0.devel13 released
Knut Alboldt
mailing
Thu Oct 14 03:24:53 CDT 2004
At 00:25 14.10.2004, John Rankin wrote:
>I would like to try an experiment, if possible. This recaps and
>(I hope) improves an earlier proposal around spacing. It hangs
>together in my head as a workable alternative to the current scheme,
>but needs a proper test.
>
>- take what the author enters inside [[...]] and make a name
> by changing ' ' to '_' (eg [[War and Peace]] becomes
> War_and_Peace
>
>- take WikiWords and make the page name as Wiki_Words; this
> avoids the serious problem of WikiWords and Wiki_Words
> becoming different pages
>
>- for backwards compatibility, if authors write [[War and Peace]]
> and it doesn't exist, look for a page called WarAndPeace; this is
> analogous to WikiWord looking for WikiWord.WikiWord and
> WikiWord.HomePage
>
>- if an author enters Group.WikiWord in the browser address bar,
> it needs to look for Group.Wiki_Word; if neither Group.WikiWord
> nor Group.Wiki_Word exists, display 'Describe [[Wiki Word]] here'
> and on save create Wiki_Word
would be nice, if this behaviour (searching for Group.WikiWord as
alternative) could be customizable (dis/enable). It's ok when migrating an
old wiki, but I would prefer moving to a new policy and renaming old
pagenames by a cli-tool.
So I would prefer the behaviour described abouve without looking for
Group.WikiWord, but always translating WikiWord and [[Wiki Word]] to
Wiki_Word for page naming and translating any "_" within names back to
"space" when displaying.
>- all link displays change '_' back into ' '
>
>What benefits might this bring:
>
>- closer to the author's intentions: War and Peace stays as
> War and Peace everywhere; it doesn't become War And Peace
I would appreciate this ! It make text more readable or more exact to the
language syntax. If you're running a wiki for IT-people it might be not
that necessary, but if you running the wiki for people, who want's to write
"normal" text it's important to write it in a right syntax. So the only
possiblity now is using links with alternate text, which is rather much
input to do. Your proposal would reduce this work.
>- by spacing WikiWords on input instead of output, it makes
> link display more straightforward: in all cases turn '_'
> into ' '
>
>- it lets authors join words that shouldn't be spaced, by
> writing [[McGillycuddy Serious Party]], thereby avoiding
> a whole class of pathalogical, but fairly common, cases
> where the AsSpaced function doesn't cope
>
>- it avoids adding complexity to the system to handle
> exceptions (eg I have a list of words to be downshifted
> and another list of words to be joined -- don't need
> either of these if pmwiki remembers spacing and
> capitalisation)
>
>- reduces the need for a [:title ... :] directive
>
>So my hypothesis is that this scheme might do a better job
>of spacing, for those sites that want spacing. It feels to
>me that getting spacing right is adding complexity and
>what feel like slightly gratuitous features. So maybe it's
>time to review the fundamental assumptions. I haven't been
>able to think of any show-stoppers that make this scheme
>unworkable. It would only apply to page names, not groups.
>
>I am happy to test this as a local customisation, but at
>the moment the page name maker function hard-wires the
>'upshift and remove spaces' algorithm. Is there any
>chance we might be able to give an alternative a trial?
>
>I think all we need is a user-modifiable AsJoined function.
>
>I see this as an alternative, not a replacement, for the
>current scheme. If done right, an administrator can switch
>schemes and everything will continue to work. IIRC, others
>have suggested something similar in the past. Now would
>be a good time to try it.
>
>What do you think?
I would appreciate this.
Knut
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