On 12/02/12 12:34, Pavel Tkachenko wrote:
>> I just mean that noone standed up and proposed "Hey, this would look
>> better in this different way".
> All those millions of people who edited pages didn't think this
> actually looks wrong? I doubt it very much, perhaps there was just no
> place to tell their thoughts or there was no one to hear because "this
> is fine for amateurs".
I don't think so. Some may have thought "How odd", but probably few
thought "this is wrong", as that requires a deeper knowledge, and when
you start you don't usually enter challenging everything.
For instance, the traffic sign showing you a man inside a circle marks
paths were pedestrians SHALL NOT go. Does everybody get confused at that
when learning how to drive? No. You just accept that and move on.
>> Anyone can create new templates, with any name and parameters he wishes.
> Templates are powerful but widely abused feature since they can be
> used to hide parser/markup bugs. I even think templates should only be
> created by devs after discussion, otherwise it results in what we see
> now.
The concept of template is for transcluding content which is stored
once, used many times. It is wrong to need a dev to create a template
for listing the stars of galaxy XYZ, or the emperors of the Roman Empire.
Yes, they are abused, many times simplifying complex constructs.
To defense them, they weren't expected to be used for conditional
programming. It was a technique discovered by the wikipedians themselves.
>>> 3. {{About "Something, something and something", of kind}}
>>> As you can see, no character is banned from the title (...)
>> What about the separator? Eg. [[The character "]]
> Nothing, it's fine. Two options exist for the parser:
> 1. Either it treats all " as starting a new context and thus [[The
> character "]]"]] actually creates a link with caption <The character
> "]]">.
> 2. Or it treats ]] as an ultimate token and standalone " is output as is.
Would you write {{About "The character "]]", page 2", of kind}} ?
>>> Right, and pipes should not appear in templates either. It's too special
>>> symbol.
>> Why so? So far the only reason you gave is that it's not on all keyboard
>> layouts.
> And is not used in most languages, yes. Is it bad enough reason? Why
> choose it for an international project like MediaWiki, if there are
> alternatives?
That it's not used in most languages is a feature. And its nonetheless
present on many keyboards, due to its usage in C, the shell...
Looking at the ~70 layouts at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout it seems present on most of
them, with the exceptions being Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian,
Sinhalese, Thai, Dzongkha
A 10% is higher than desired, but seems fitted enough. Also note that
Sinhalese, Thai or Dzongkha don't contain symbols like ", that you are
proposing as alternatives (yes, typing wikitext there must be a nightmare).
>>> * remote links can also get their title from <title> after fetching
>>> first 4 KiB of that page or something
>> No way. That can be good for preloading a title on link insertion and
>> storing it indefinitely, but not for doing it every time.
> Of course not every time, the engine might maintain the cache with
> remote links or somehow else alleviate the traffic. And it can be
> disabled and then the parser wil use some other means of generating
> title for titleless external links.
It's not just a issue of adding a caching layer. You can't show content
stored elsewhere. Suppose you added to an article about a Queen a link
titled "Interview with X". Then later you change the title to "X is a
bitch". The change is the fault of the target document author, but you
failed miserably. That's while it can be suggested when loading the
article, it should be stored with the link.
>> Only if pages with no spaces are more common than pages with spaces in
>> the name.
>> Taking enwiki articles as a sample:
>> * 7746101 articles with space.
>> * 1416235 articles without space.
> Thanks for the statistics. Well, then my point about "half of the
> cases" isn't fair; however, this doesn't change the fact the pipe
> isn't as universal as double equality sign which can still typed with
> the same speed and is less prone to misoperations because it's double
> and has less chances to appear in-text.
Double equality sign is only popular among programmers.
> I think MediaWiki currently lets the user create even the 6th level
> heading before the doc title?
Yes, header hierarchy is not enforced by the software, although I don't
think I have been seen it misused.
>>> Not at all because we are talking about context-specific grammar.
>>> Addresses in links can hold no formatting and thus all but context
>>> ending tokens (]], space and ==) are ignored there.
>> Oh, you're not autolinking urls.
> I didn't really understand that.
If you write http://www.google.com in your syntax, that isn't a link,
but just text.
By autolinking I mean that urls in the text are automatically converted
into links.
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