Link tokenization (was Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Re: Zip meta-data)

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

In message <147...@da...>,Arno Hollosi writes:
>
> > > Or do you think we should store the intermediate state instead?
> > 
> > Yes, this is an idea I had a long time ago.
> > I thought that [...] it would open up some interesting possibilities
>
>Sure :o)
>I'm in favour of this change. We have to think about some side effects
>like links to pages not yet existing.

As of yet, I'm not at all convinced this is worth the effort.  It's a big
kettle of fish.  I see three reasons to consider saving the pages in
a partially transformed state:

 1. Eliminate name collisions when merging wikis.

    Well, before we can merge wikis we need an interchange format.  (Currently,
    this is shaping up to be my zipfile.)  Then, page name tokenization only
    helps if the interchanged format contains tokenized names.  I'm pretty sure
    this is not the greatest idea.

    So, I think this is a moot point.

 2. Easy automatic link fixing when a page is renamed.

    I don't think this makes it worth the effort.  It will be easy enough
    to translate the links (e.g. with my forthcoming generalized 
wiki_transform)
    in the raw markup.

 3. Faster page rendering.

    This might be an issue.  However, if it is, I think the best way to speed
    page rendering is just to cache the transformed HTML in the database.

Drawbacks of partial pre-transforming:

 1. Complexity.  (Not that I'm not a fan of complexity ;-? )
 2. Bugs in transform code are more likely to cause permanent changes/losses
    of page content.
 3. Inversion of the pre-transform is another kettle of fish, especially if one
    wants to ensure the the output of the inversion matches the original 
markup.
    (Eg. was the link entered as "WikiLink", "[WikiLink]", or "[  WikiLink ]"?)

Jeff