[Phpwiki-talk] "dangling references"

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

I've been reading parts of "Multimedia and Hypertext: the Internet and
Beyond," by Jakob Neilson
(<URL:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0125184085/qid=981432634/sr=1-6/ref=sc_b_6/107-7065042-5444529>.
There's an interesting chapter on hypertext authoring (like writing Wiki
pages) and how little research has been done on what makes authoring
hypertext easier. (We just use a TEXTAREA like anyone else).

We've talked before about storing links in a separate table, which would
make it easy to do a few things:

list undefined links
rename links
delete links

Neilson calls undefined links "dangling references" (to "dangle" means to
hang from something, like an apple dangling from a tree branch).
Apparently in the hypertext systems the book surveyed, and projects he was
involved with, listing dangling refs was very useful to hypertext authors.

The challenge here is we have to preprocess Wiki pages to parse out the
links, update the table of links, and store the page. When the page is
rendered, all links are matched from the page to the table. These things
are fairly easy, and we have most of the code. It's a matter of
reorganization.

When a page is deleted we can then delete all references to it as well.

Any thoughts?

~swain

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