Re: [Tikiwiki-devel] Merging category & structure features

[Nick W. <nic...@vi...>]

Hi,

This sounds a little similar to something I'd thought might be a good idea, at 
least in some cicumstances.  

I currently avoid wiki name conflicts using unwieldy wiki names like 
'Projects:ProjectName:Design:Topic' to disambiguate a page from 
'Projects:ProjectName2:Design:Topic'.  This is one has to do in programming 
situations when you only have global scope.  So I thought, why not support an 
idea like scope directly?

[I had been thinking as I wrote, and the result was a perhaps a bit of a 
ramble. I've summarised my basic idea here to avoid making people follow my 
ramble, which has some criticisms I may add in a follow up.]

In brief:

* Categories are nestable wiki-name containers (A.K.A. lexical scopes and 
namespaces in programing languages).

* An Interwiki is a kind of top level category

* The wiki link syntax is extended, using some delimiter to indicate scope 
descent, and another for scope ascent, using filesystems as a model:

[Perhaps using ':' as a delimiter because currently '/' is disallowed, and ':' 
means roughly the same thing in the existing inter-wiki syntax. '.' is an 
alternative, too]

So,
- this is a link to a page "Overview" the current category: 
((Overview))

- this is a reletive link to the grand-parent category's page of the same 
name: 
((..:..:Overview))

or maybe a more succinct notation might be
((++Overview))

- this is a reletive link to a page in a child of a child category
((Topic1:Appendix:References))

- this is an absolute link:
((:Projects:Project1))

- this is an interwiki link
((:ForeignWiki:Pagename))

or maybe

((@ForeignWiki:Pagename))


That about sums it up.  More ideas may follow when I've tidied them (they 
concern questions about what to do when pages are moved/renamed, and backward 
compatibility with the current scheme).

Cheers,

Nick