[pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Re: Dynamic wiki trails

chr at home.se chr at home.se
Wed Mar 16 02:56:45 CST 2005


On 16 Mar 2005, John Rankin wrote:

> On Wednesday, 16 March 2005 12:48 PM, chr at home.se wrote: 
> >> If a particular page is on more than one trail, it gets more than one
> >> set of previous / next links.
> >
> >Ahem... that's actually something I would like to be able to avoid in some 
> >cases. 
> 
> RATS! I give up.

Oh, please dont... :-)

> >> Thought: what if we put [[!Trail]] on any trail pages?
> >
> >Patrick has the point that specifying the name of a this particular 
> >category is not so nice. I agree because of the reason that it'll get 
> >annoying in other languages...
> 
> To be sure; one would want to translate the label into the local
> language, but the principle of labelling the page still applies.

Maybe.. the drawback would be that [[!Trail]] is actually also sort of a 
directive, and I'm not to keen on having different directives in different 
languages... I guess it should be ok though, if the wiki markup that 
refers to it also contains "Trail" in the current language.

Btw, using (:trails !Rats:) would be a nice syntax for generating a trail 
based on the category Rats.

> >Sound ideas, and I think the strategy you just described could be very 
> >useful for some sites. For my particular application I think it'd be too 
> >limited however :-(
> 
> Hmmm. Is the /only/ limitation the one about showing one trail at a time, 
> depending on some criteria? What about this scenario:
> 
> If I just happen onto a page, pmwiki shows all the trails the page is on.

That's fine, might even be preferably in the general case (unless the page 
belongs to *many* trails...)

> Once I start following a trail, whether I link from a page labelled
> [[!trail]] (in your local language) or by starting to follow a trail
> from a page I landed on from elsewhere, the other trail links disappear.

That would work well, but note that in some cases people might prefer to 
keep all the trail links, so for now I think we should consider my 
scenario the odd one that requires some special option or whatever.

> But if I leave the trail, pmwiki shows all the trails the new page is
> on.

Brilliant!  That means that if you leave the trail and then click back to
the page you'll see all the trail links, but that'd be fine - and maybe
even helpful. Ideally, pressing "BACK" in the browser would only show the
trail link you were using before. If you do "RELOAD" in the browser, I'd
be fine with either getting all the trail links, or just the original one.

> Or perhaps, pmwiki /always/ shows the trails each page is on, but only
> previous and next links for the trail I am currently following.

I guess that could work as well.. haven't thought of this alternative. It 
might be quite a good alternative actually, although it probably still 
requires you to solve the problem of remembering what trail you are on.

> And this would be an option you could turn on and off.
> 
> This could be achieved, I think, by combining [[!trail]] labels with
> ?trail=TrailPage in the url for previous and next links.
> 
> Would that work for you?

Yes, definitely. Although I think [[!trail]] is not strictly neccessary,
since it really just servers as a way to tag a page by saying that it is a
trail page. We should probably generalize this so that a page can do
something like (:trails !TrailType1:) and only show trail links for trails
belonging to the category 'TrailType1'.

Maybe it's time to summarize how all this would work... this thread is
long enough as it is...

/Christian


-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr




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