On mer, 2002-02-27 at 13:30, Magnus Manske wrote:
The functions that could be performed (and that I can
think of) are:
1. Replacement of HTML tags by wiki tags (namely, "<b>" and
"<i>", maybe
"<h1>" as well)
2. Eliminating links to redirect pages by changing the link in question to
the target of the redirect
Hmm, maybe. Sometimes redirects are wrong, though!
3. Marking [broken links]] and [[more broken links]
4. Optimizing external links with too many [] (like
[[
http://www.google.com]])
Question: why do we have the separate forms [X] for external links and
[[X]] for internal links? Unless we're going to add http:, ftp:, news:
or mailto: namespaces, I don't see much possibility of conflict.
There may be good historical reasons I am not aware of.
5. Optimizing [[link|links]] to [[link]]s
Please don't! Not only is the result very ugly, but it would lead to
inconsistent link appearance for irregular and regular plurals
([[foot|feet]] vs [[hand]]s), never mind the issue of other languages.
6. Removing [[Talk:thispage|Talk]] links (at the end
of the page)
I am sure you can think of some more details that have always bugged you,
but that were (be themselves) not important enough to call for a function;)
We could use this for rather fancy things as well:
7. In the preview, mark words (or word combinations) that are currently
plain text, but that do exist as a topic in the database (to find pages one
could link to).
8. In the preview, mark all numbers that could be dates (more link
candidates).
9. Automatically put the title phrase in bold if it appears in the first
paragraph.
This would be even more fun if we had a WYSIWIG editor. Just think of
all the myriad colors and wavy underlines and mysterious icons we could
bedazzle the poor confused users with! Or, wait, were we supposed to be
*nice* to the users? :)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)