On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com> wrote: > On thing that annoys me about mediawiki is that I'll sometimes follow > a link only to discover that the link is just a redirect to a page > that I've read already. > > Would it be so terrible to resolve redirects at parse time so that the > destination bar in my browser (and the link coloring) reflect the > redirect target?
Caching is one problem here. Another is that you need to reliably generate the "redirected from" link somehow, so that redirects are maintainable. You don't want an editor to click a link, arrive at a totally different page (maybe via an inappropriate redirect), and have no idea how they got there. > This would have some caching interaction— changes to redirects > wouldn't be effective until the linking pages were re-parsed... of > course, work queue entries could be created... and the harm caused by > this could be mitigated by using a priority tracking and event-merging > work-queue. (I have no clue if such a beast is being used today...) The job queue is already horribly overloaded, I don't think adding more things to it would be a good thing. On the other hand, since this particular change doesn't affect anything visible to templates or such, you wouldn't have to reparse the whole page to update it, in principle. You could keep some kind of marker in the parsed page instead of an actual link, and do a simple search-and-replace to insert the correct URLs when the page is viewed. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
