(Note: This email is long but there's an important question for guide admins in the middle.)
An issue that came up today while we were going through the tickets is that at the moment, people can (and do) put wiki formatting into the "website" field on the edit form, specifically the square bracket external link format. We're undecided about whether this should be supported or not, so I volunteered to post to the list and ask for opinions.
Arguments for continuing to support it:
* Existing guides may already have a substantial amount of website data in this format, and if we stop supporting it then the admins will have to go through and change it all. * It gives people an easy way to specify some text to be used as the link, in the cases where the URL is long.
Arguments against:
* It's wrong, semantically. That piece of metadata should contain a URL, not a snippet of wikitext. * It means we have to munge the data every time we want to emit website metadata (e.g. in RDF).
Dom would definitely like to stop supporting this, and I mostly agree with him. In order to do this we need two things.
First of all, we need to know if this would cause a substantial amount of hassle for people. I know that RGL makes heavy use of the square bracket syntax in the website field, but I'm OK with sorting that out. Will this be an issue for anyone else?
We'd also need an alternative way of deciding on the link text for long URLs. Possibilities: * Another metadata field (downside: the edit form is already pretty full) * Fixed text defined by us, e.g. "Home page of this place" (downside: not sure it's possible to come up with something suitable that everyone will like) * Some method of generating link text from the URL. Dom suggested just using the domain name, so e.g. http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/AMR.html would display as Website: [www.nationalrail.co.uk] or maybe Website: [nationalrail.co.uk]
Thoughts?
Kake