[Phpwiki-talk] Re: Link tokenization

[Steve W. <sw...@wc...>]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Jeff Dairiki wrote:

> 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.
> 
>     So, I think this is a moot point.

Yes, I was recounting that I thought about the problem when I was trying
to merge two Wikis, not that it was a motivating factor here. Our criteria
here should be, will this bring real benefits?

>  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.

OK...

>  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.

Oh, I hadn't thought of that... but I doubt the gain would be much.

> 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 ]"?)

No doubt, there is risk. "Fortune favors the bold." :-)
Point 3 is particularly troublesome though.

I sketched out a simple pair of algorithms to help me think about this:

On submit of a page:
   replace all links with tokens
   update list of links
   save page to db
   save list to db

On select of page:
   fetch page
   fetch link list
   replace tokens with links
   send page to user

So what are the possible benefits? Here's a list of what I thought of:

Undefined pages can be listed separately (ListOfUndefinedPages), page
names can be changed, pages can be deleted (and links to deleted pages
would be replaced with a message, or link to a different page)

Three things, initially. 

sw

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