[pmwiki-users] Making a domain name a wiki page

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Wed, 31 May 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

>> I've been wondering if some sort of escaping mechanism couldn't be used
>> here, so that something like [[Group\.Name.Ver\ 1\.2]] could produce a
>> link like
>>
>>   http://www.somewiki.org/Group.Name/Ver 1.2/

> A *very* useful idea.  I'll keep it in mind.

It is useful, but with the drawback that it'd not favour the authors, who 
has to escape the special characeters in name. An alternative, not sure 
if you intended this above, is to escape the separator between group and 
name.

A question though... is '/' a valid characeter within a path component of 
a URI? I'm guessing not, which means that we don't loose that much if we 
never let '/' be an (easily) allowed character in a page name.

Having said that, there have been times when I've wanted to name uploaded 
files something like Beeker2003_GPS/INS_systems.pdf. I've stayed away from 
trying to do something like that.

> At the moment I'm thinking that we'll establish an equivalence
> between underscores and spaces, so that
>
>    [[Group.Name with spaces]]
>
> will generate a url like
>
>    http://www.example.com/wiki/Group/Name_with_spaces

That sounds like a good solution compared to

>    http://www.example.com/wiki/Group/Name%20with%20spaces

which in addition to being annoying to type, also looks ugly in the 
browser's URI field.

> Using underscores is also more consistent with the way that MediaWiki 
> names its pages.

How will the collision with the old style be handled? I mean,
 	[[Name with spaces]]
used to link to .../NameWithSpaces?

And how will this be treated

 	[[Name     with     spaces]]

This seems quite difficult in general. (Although in my last example 
multiple spaces could simply be collapsed into a single space).

/Christian

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