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

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 01:16:23PM +0200, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>> 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.
>
> That would seem to be even less favorable to authors.  Which is more 
> commonly used -- the '.' as separator or as a character in a group or 
> name?

You're quite right, I was being very unclear here. I just wanted to bring 
to attention that both '.' between both the group name and inside the name 
had been escaped.

> For PmWiki I'm fairly sure it's more common as a separator than as a 
> component of a name.  Put another way, we don't want to make people 
> always have to write things like [[Main\.HomePage]], which invites a lot 
> of confusion (and is imo more author unfriendly).

Agreed.

>> 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.
>
> I think what you meant to ask is if '/' would be a valid character
> in one of the pieces of the path

Yes, that's what I meant.

> and the URI specification doesn't make any restrictions about that.

Ok.

>> How will the collision with the old style be handled? I mean,
>> 	[[Name with spaces]]
>> used to link to .../NameWithSpaces?
>
> I'm still working that out.  I'm thinking there will be a sequence of 
> checks -- it'll first look for "Name_with_spaces" (case insensitive), 
> and if that's not found it'll check for "NameWithSpaces" (probably also 
> case insensitive).

I like this approach - it's becoming bmore and more like the link targets 
are  really search criteria. However, what do we do about multiple 
matches?   One solution might be to not allow the creation of a new page 
with a confusing name. (Or at least warn the author when it's created).

>> And how will this be treated
>> 	[[Name     with     spaces]]
>
> Multiple spaces would be treated the same as a single space.

Sounds good.

/Christian

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