[pmwiki-users] Proposal to change (...) in links to {...}

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Aug 25 12:40:37 CDT 2008


I'd like to propose that we begin migrating to using
curly braces instead of parens to suppress parts of links.

Background:  Currently PmWiki uses parentheses in [[links]]
to allow certain parts of the link test to be suppressed.
For example, instead of writing a link as

  [[http://www.pmichaud.com | pmichaud.com]]

an author can write

  [[(http://www.)pmichaud.com]]

and the part inside the parentheses is suppressed.

Proposal:  I'd like to start switching pmwiki to use
curly braces (or perhaps some other bracketing character) 
instead of parens for this, such that the above link would 
be written as:

  [[{http://www.}pmichaud.com]]

The primary reason for making this switch is that unlike
curly braces and brackets, bare parentheses are legal in
urls.  As a result, people who want to write a url
containing parentheses (common on Wikipedia) have to write 
%28 and %29 for parens so that PmWiki doesn't treat them
as link text suppression markers.

In this proposal we would not immediately eliminate the
use of parens to suppress link text -- it would be left
as an option for now and removed in some future major
release of PmWiki.

Any comments on this proposal?

Pm




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