(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
On Jun 9, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Kake L Pugh wrote:
Dom would definitely like to stop supporting this, and I mostly agree with him. In order to do this we need two things.
I have to agree with Dom (and you), this is probably a bad thing. I'm surprised it doesn't break the RDF export already.
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?
As far as I know St. Paul doesn't do this.
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?
Well you can do what dispy does online and grab the title from the remote page, or go through a shortener like xrl.us
-Chris
On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 11:04:39PM -0500, Chris Prather wrote:
On Jun 9, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Kake L Pugh wrote:
Dom would definitely like to stop supporting this, and I mostly agree with him. In order to do this we need two things.
I have to agree with Dom (and you), this is probably a bad thing. I'm surprised it doesn't break the RDF export already.
It does; this is where we started:
http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/21
Well you can do what dispy does online and grab the title from the remote page, or go through a shortener like xrl.us
The first idea is a possibility, except that there is no particular guarantee the title tag will be sane, or that you will be able to retrieve the page at the time.
I am against using a URL shortener for this, as it introduces a dependency on an external service, and obfuscates things.
Another possibility I don't remember discussing is rather than displaying it as:
Website: <a href="http://www.example.org/">foo</a> or Website: http://www.example.org
just display it as
<a href="http://www.example.org/">Website</a>
Dominic.
On Sun 10 Jun 2007, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
The first idea is a possibility, except that there is no particular guarantee the title tag will be sane, or that you will be able to retrieve the page at the time.
Yes - some pages have fairly useless title tags. Plus, I think we want to try and make sure the link text is fairly short.
I've just realised that using the domain name is possibly not the best idea either, since some domain names are rather long, so we'd not actually be solving the problem of URLs stretching across the page.
just display it as
<a href="http://www.example.org/">Website</a>
I thought of that, but decided it might look a bit wrong in the middle of a list of key: value pairs to suddenly have something that's just a key:
* Address: Station Approach (map) (gmap) (multimap) * Postcode: HP6 5DW * Website * Categories: Free Geodata, Metropolitan Line, Rail, Tube, Zone D Stations * Locales: Amersham, HP6
Kake
On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 12:55:38PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Sun 10 Jun 2007, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
just display it as
<a href="http://www.example.org/">Website</a>
I thought of that, but decided it might look a bit wrong in the middle of a list of key: value pairs to suddenly have something that's just a key:
- Address: Station Approach (map) (gmap) (multimap)
- Postcode: HP6 5DW
- Website
- Categories: Free Geodata, Metropolitan Line, Rail, Tube, Zone D Stations
- Locales: Amersham, HP6
That's true, but could possibly be solved by taking it out of that list and presenting it separately. Perhaps as part of the page title:
Node Name [website]
Dominic.
On 10/06/07, Kake L Pugh kake@earth.li wrote:
I've just realised that using the domain name is possibly not the best idea either, since some domain names are rather long, so we'd not actually be solving the problem of URLs stretching across the page.
On Sun 10 Jun 2007, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote: just display it as
<a href="http://www.example.org/">Website</a>
I thought of that, but decided it might look a bit wrong in the middle of a list of key: value pairs to suddenly have something that's just a key:
In similar situations recently, I've decided to display a limited length chunk of the URL, or all of it if it's short. So it would look like
* Website: http://this-url-is-really-long.com/and-it...
or
* Website: http://quiteshortsite.com/
Both are of course working hyperlinks.
Does this sound like a reasonable compromise?
On Jun 10, 2007, at 11:09 AM, Earle Martin wrote:
In similar situations recently, I've decided to display a limited length chunk of the URL, or all of it if it's short. So it would look like
- Website: http://this-url-is-really-long.com/and-it...
or
- Website: http://quiteshortsite.com/
Both are of course working hyperlinks.
Does this sound like a reasonable compromise?
I was going to suggest something similar, but I like yours better. If the URL is over a (wiki.conf configurable) length, then crop the displayed length, and link that.
-Chris
On Sun 10 Jun 2007, Earle Martin openguides@downlode.org wrote:
In similar situations recently, I've decided to display a limited length chunk of the URL, or all of it if it's short. So it would look like
- Website: http://this-url-is-really-long.com/and-it...
or
- Website: http://quiteshortsite.com/
OK, I like this best of all the current suggestions, so will go with this. Thanks, Earle!
Now, the next question is what we do with old data once we start mandating that the website field should contain a valid URL - as in, how do we get people's old data to conform?
Kake
openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org
-
Chris Prather -
Dominic Hargreaves -
Earle Martin -
Kake L Pugh