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]]
Or you could disk cache the incomplete page containing only the body text,
which should often not need re-rendering, as most alterations consist of
changing the link targets exactly, and we can know pages that exist before
rendering a single page. Then after backlinks have been resolved, it would
suffice to feed this body text from the cache file to the template. However, e.g.
the inline plugin would demand extra rendering after the depended-upon pages
have been rendered, but these pages should usually not be that frequent, or
contain that many other pages in full. (And for 'archive' pages we don't need
to remember that much information from the semi-inlined pages.) It would help
if you could get data structures instead of HTML text from the HTMLizer, and
then simply cache these data structures in some quickly-loadeble form (that
I suppose perl itself has support for). Regexp hacks are so ugly compared
to actually parsing a properly-defined syntax...
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]]
This is, however, still missing specifying the link text, and adding that option would seem to me to complicate the plugin syntax a lot, unless support is added for the |-syntax for specifying a particular parameter to every plugin.
... Returning to this, the syntax infact wouldn't be so bad with the |-syntax, given a short name for the plugin:
[[whatever|ref 1]]
\[[ref 1=page_with_long_name]]
It also shouldn't be difficult to support non-wiki links in this same way, so that you could still link everywhere in an uniform manner, as the (still preferred by me) HTML processing approach would provide. Perhaps a plugin call wouldn't even be necessary for the links themselves: what about aliases for the normal link mechanism? Although the 'ref' call may infact be cleaner, and adding that |-syntax for plugins could offer other possibilities for other plugins.
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