I'll tweak the rewrite rules later; in the meantime I've replaced the classic Apache welcome page with a nice simple redirect-to-main-wiki- page. On mer, 2002-12-25 at 18:55, Jonathan Walther wrote: Should be straightforward -- just use %26 wherever it represents content and & where it's a magic query string component separator: http://foobar/wiki/Beeswax_%26_Honey http://foobar/wiki/Beeswax_%26_Honey?action=edit http://foobar/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere?target=Beeswax_%26_Honey&limit… The URL-building functions may need tweaking to know to use the question mark to start building a query string. (And remember Apache's mod-rewrite de-URL-encodes the path components before you get to them; that's why we use a patched ampescape function to re-encode the ampersands in titles being moved from the path to the query string.) Check the ownerhsip/permissions on your upload directory. If it can't create the log file, you may not be able to upload files either. The dir should be writable by the webserver's process. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On mer, 2002-12-25 at 22:51, Jonathan Walther wrote: The backend implementation is not relevant. By using mod_rewrite, the URL can be in any format we like with the PHP system. But that's no excuse for making URLs long, confusing, and fragile. That, I think, would be annoying, as you couldn't bookmark it or send someone a URL without digging through backroom docs for the magic incantation. Standard URL syntax provides for a query string (starting with "?"), we shouldn't be afraid to use it. Overloading the anchor syntax (starting with "#") isn't a good idea, as I believe it won't be sent to the http server, and is intended to be interpreted by the browser (and would break the asked-by-some ability to actually use anchors in pages). Technically you could use the hex-code for #, but that's fragile. (Somebody's going to try to type it, and it won't work.) I'd prefer: http://foo/en/Special:Whatlinkshere?target=A%26W+Root+Beer&limit=50 or, knowing that many special pages operate explicitly on a target, one could rearrange, folding most of them back into the already existing "action" sequence: http://foo/en/A&W_Root_Beer?action=whatlinkshere&limit=50 http://foo/en/User:Billybob?action=contributions Or even yet, we could take advantage of the path syntax, as long as special pages are never named with slashes: http://foo/en/Special:Whatlinkshere/A&W_Root_Beer?limit=50 http://foo/en/Special:Contributions/Billybob This has the advantage also of preserving ampersand functionality; ampersands aren't special in the _path_ portion of a URL, so if someone types them in raw it's okay, whereas it will generally break if someone puts in a raw ampersand when constructing a query string. Remember, URLs should be human-readable and human-rememberable if possible; people *will* try to muck about with them manually. They *will* e-mail URLs to friends and colleagues. They *will* print them and send them to other people who will have to type them in. They *will* try to speak them over the phone. Non-ascii characters and special punctuation marks can be a pain for this, alas, but we should minimize the trouble we make in the basic syntax. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On ĵaŭ, 2002-12-26 at 00:33, Jonathan Walther wrote: Sure. See RFC 2396, which defines the structure of URIs. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt That would break up as: (scheme)(authority)(path)(query) (http)(foo)(/w/Who_Killed_JFK)(?action=history&limit=10) (Technically the question mark is "reserved" in the contents of a query string, and I'm not sure it's allowed except as the separator from the path.) Question mark is simply *not* a valid URL _path_ character, there's nothing we can do about that that doesn't flaunt standards and break things, any more than we can decide we want a domain name with a slash or a colon in it. ;) Before Apache gives the path to mod_rewrite, Apache has already normalized escaped (I should say URL-encoded; %26 etc) characters. So a path of "/wiki/A%26W_soda" comes to our mod_rewrite rules as "/wiki/A&W_soda". If we take it and put it raw into a query string: "title=A&W_soda", no good because that will break into "title=A" and "W_soda" when PHP interprets the query. That's why we add an explicit escaping for that character. The second ? is interpreted as a separator between path and query before rewriting comes up. By default if you create a new query string via a rewrite rule it wipes out any existing query string completely, replacing it. There's an option [QSA] to append instead; I haven't yet checked to see if it adds an ampersand separator or if that needs to be tweaked further. Our namespaces aren't really hierarchical: Talk:, User:, User_talk: etc... We have a flat namespace of namespaces. ;) Somebody types: http://foo/en/Special:Whatlinkshere?target=A&W_Root_Beer they get: (http)(foo)(/en/Special:Whatlinkshere)((target=A)(W_Root_Beer)) Thus they see links to the page [[A]]. Question marks remain problematic in the other case, of course. You can't win. ;) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)