I'd welcome feedback from OpenGuides people as well.
-----Original Message----- From: london.pm-admin@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-admin@london.pm.org]On Behalf Of Tim Sweetman Sent: 23 July 2004 15:02 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: Re: wiki-ness (Was: Re: devolving and crack fuel)
.....
if you choose the right software you can make them go away. http://search.cpan.org/~kake/CGI-Wiki-Kwiki-0.52/ is quite
nice when you
make it use usemod formatting and make it not use studly
caps for links.
I think there's a basic conflict here:
- authors want to write links like
[shepherds bush] ShepherdsBush [shepherd's bush] and have them work.
StudlyCaps are just plain easier to type, and avoid doing [this
or
]this, and confusing the parser, and the writer, who's not that technical and isn't used to incorrect syntax blowing the bloody doors off.
- readers want stuff to be formatted like English (if they
care, which they might not) and to avoid miscontextualisation along the lines of
... the bodyguard shepherds Bush through the throng ... (not saying if it was Kate, Vannevar or a George, mind)Punctuation helps. StudlyCapsLookAwful, especially to nonprogrammers who are just plain not used to them.
My solution would be: a) pages can have multiple names, one of which is the preferred/canonical one. (This is a bit like the more widespread "redirect node" feature) b) links are written with the node's canonical name.
writer writes ShepherdsBush (or [shepherd's bush]) reader sees Shepherd's Bush.
(This could work well with people/entities who insist on spelling their names in a "difficult" way, such as with accents your keyboard doesn't have)
- Names may themselves want canonicalisation. Is it Earl's Court or
Earls Court? Probably depends which sign you read, and with place names even LynneTruss is bound to get it wrong sometimes.
No, I haven't implemented this.
I raised this on the OpenGuides-dev list last year, see http://openguides.org/mail/openguides-dev/2003-October/thread.html#91
I'd be very interested if it is possible to resolve these issues - at least arriving at a sensible compromise. OpenGuides and its intrinsic search function could do with having this matter resolved.
This is how it works at the moment:
1. Node names are normalised before being inserted into the database. This involves turning spaces to underscores, capitalising initial letters (Title Case), and escaping out of pathological metacharacters that would otherwise break the parsing.
2. Links are normalised as they are followed, permitting use of unnormalised text e.g. different case.
3. Punctuation characters in titles are preserved (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens)
4. Permitted search strings have a restricted character set
As keeper of the search, I would like to know if we have got this right or not, especially the normalisation aspect of this.
We are also being faced with new challenges, regarding character sets and internationalization.
Your feedback would be most welcome :).
Ivor.