[pmwiki-users] Re: Question about HTML output for link targets

[John Rankin]

On Thursday, 3 February 2005 11:18 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 11:02:42AM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
>> You might look at the Cookbook.SubpageMarkup recipe. 
>
>I did exactly that -- indeed, when I first recognized that I really
>wanted comments to be in a separate page I took a look at subpages.
>(I meant to include credit to you for the idea in my previous message
>but got distracted before hitting "send".  Sorry about that.)

No worries :)
>
>> - I ended up with [[*Subpage]] markup to mean
>[[{$Group}.{$PageName}*Subpage]]
>
>I don't like '*' for the very practical reason that someone doing
>the command line "rm Group.SomePage*SubPage" to remove a page might
>be very upset by the results.  It also just looks funny and could scare
>off a few admins.

I'm not sure I like it either; but I think I liked the other
alternatives less...

>
>In considering "~" I did think about the potential conflict with [[~xyz]],
>but I wasn't necessarily planning to allow a [[~subpage]]
>markup.  

Although one wouldn't want to choose an option that may either prevent
or confuse a subpage markup -- it's better to keep future options open...
>
>And even though hyphens are allowed in page names, I still haven't 
>excluded just using plain hyphen ('-') here, as in "-Comments" and
>"-Draft".  Using hyphen wouldn't mean excluding it from other page
>names; it's just that page names ending in '-Comments', '-Draft', etc.
>would be "special" (without having to introduce a full
>"subpage"
>capability).

Hmmm. Introducing language-specific special cases sounds like it may
have some undesirable side-effects.

One could make the subpage suffix require a -[[:upper:]] but that
is open to misinterpretation. It doesn't seem right that sometimes
a hyphen is just a hyphen and sometimes it denotes a subpage.

Here's a provocative suggestion:

What if one used the '/' character??? Is that allowed?
ie Group.Page/Subpage

And used (for example) Group,PageName to mean [[(Group.)PageName]].

Is a ; (semi-colon) allowed?
ie Group.Page;Subpage

(I expect I'm going to be sorry I asked :)

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin