[Phpwiki-talk] Interwiki map extension for visually friendlier links?

[Dan F. <dfr...@cs...>]

Folks,

I want to enable the creation of user-friendly lists of restaurants, 
like "my top 10 favorites". I also want that those restaurants have a 
clear owner (perhaps optional), and a list 'type' (like "favorite").

Thus, the owner and type need to

a) be computer-parsable (i.e. I can parse it out of the page)
b) show up visually nice

It felt to me like the interwiki-map-style URLs are very close to this, 
but I'd also like to control the look and feel of the link in the map. 
So, right now, if I define a line in InterWikiMap

  ListOwner http:/index.php/ShowLists?user=%s

and put a link on a page

ListOwner:DanFr

it will nicely redirect that link to a plugin (if I write one, which I 
haven't).

However, I don't want to see "ListOwner:DanFr" on the rendered page, I 
want to see

  Click to see DanFr's other lists.

or something, which is all clickable.

so I thought about trying to expand the InterWikiMap syntax to something 
like

  ListOwner http:/index.php/ShowLists?user=%s Click to see %s's other lists

where all stuff after the 2nd column is the "display" of the link (if 
present).

I can actually see using this quite a bit, because we are having an 
increasing number of situations where we want simple machine-parseable 
attributes on a page (like "ListOwner", "ListType", "Buddies:", etc. 
etc.), but we'd like it to look friendlier.

Is that a good idea? Is there a better way?

If it is a good idea, what are the right places to look at doing this? I 
looked a little at InlineParser.php around LinkBracketLink line 365 
(which is where it says getInterwikiMap()). Is this where all the 
Interwiki magic happens? If no answer here, I will pursue this myself 
next week, but I thought someone might have hints.

Thanks for your attention.

Dan