On 14/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/14/06, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Also,
what exactly is so slow about the transclusion? Raw inclusion
of source code from another source is not typically a particularly
expensive operation, when thinking of C's #INCLUDE, for example. Is it
the finding of the transcluded page by name, or what?
What part of the email I sent implies it's "so slow"?
None. However, common belief appears to be that substituting commonly
used, static templates is good for performance reasons.
Never underestimate the ability of humans to emulate that which goes "baa".
So, bots that transclude for performance reasons
should be stopped?
All the templates that are labelled "This template is a good candidate
for subst:" should be rethought? Do you think your response represents
"the developers'" opinion in general?
Substituting templates should be done when the template is being used
as a boilerplate or in cases where, for instance, it'll never need to
be changed again. Something like a vandalism warning, as an example,
isn't going to need to be changed in all locations, so substituting it
is more appropriate, not to mention, if it's a "testX" template, then
the user can hit edit and start to understand how the site works, not
be confronted with a brace substitution.
Templates as tags, et al. do need to be changed so that things are
consistent, and should use regular transclusion.
I can't speak for the developers as a team. We all have our own
opinions about what's "neat" and "clean" from a technical
standpoint.
For what it's worth, however, Brion Vibber has expressed a previous
opinion that fragile editorial constructs are...fragile (spoken from
the perspective of an editor, I think) and that policies shouldn't be
dictated based on what people believe the server load to be.
Rob Church