Markdown supports nice short links to external sites within body text by
references defined elsewhere in the source:
foo [bar][ref]
[ref]: http://example.invalid/
It would be nice to be able to do this or something like this for wikilinks
as well, so that you can have long page names without the links cluttering
the body text. I think the best way to do this would be to move wikilink
resolving after HTML generation: parse the HTML with a proper HTML parser,
and replace relative links with links to the proper files (plus something
extra for missing pages).
That's difficult to do and have resonable speed as well. Ikiwiki needs to
know all about all the links between pages before it can know what pages
it needs to build to it can update backlink lists, update links to point
to new/moved pages etc. Currently it accomplishes this by a first pass
that scans new and changed files, and quickly finds all the wikilinks
using a simple regexp. If it had to render the whole page before it was
able to scan for hrefs using a html parser, this would make it at least
twice as slow, or would require it to cache all the rendered pages in
memory to avoid re-rendering. I don't want ikiwiki to be slow or use
excessive amounts of memory. YMMV. --[[Joey]]
A related possibility would be to move a lot of "preprocessing" after HTML
generation as well (thus avoiding some conflicts with the htmlifier), by
using special tags for the preprocessor stuff. (The old preprocessor could
simply replace links and directives with appropriate tags, that the
htmlifier is supposed to let through as-is. Possibly the htmlifier plugin
could configure the format.)
Or using postprocessing, though there are problems with that too and it
doesn't solve the link scanning issue.
Other alternatives would be
-
to understand the source format, but this seems too much work with all the supported formats; or
-
something like the shortcut plugin for external links, with additional
support for specifying the link text, but the syntax would be much more
cumbersome then.
I agree that a plugin would probably be more cumbersome, but it is very
doable. It might look something like this:
\[[link bar]]
\[[link bar=VeryLongPageName]]
