summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/doc/todo/matching_different_kinds_of_links.mdwn
blob: b71d7cc5f48727d1399ecc830b4f1d43bfd5a830 (plain)

[[!tag wishlist]]

As noted in [[todo/tag_pagespec_function]], there is a "misbehavior" of a tagged() pagespec: it matches even pages which have plain links to the tag page.

And in general, it would be quite useful to be able to distinguish different kinds of links: one more kind, in addition to "tag", is "bug dependency" noted in [[todo/structured_page_data#another_kind_of_links]] and [[todo/tracking_bugs_with_dependencies#another_kind_of_links]].

It could distinguish the links by the rel= attribute. ([[Tags already receive a special rel-class|todo/rel_attribute_for_links]].) This means there is a general need for a syntax to specify user-defined rel-classes on wikilink (then bug deps would simply use their special rel-class, either directly, or through a special directive like \[[!depends ]]), and to refer to them in pagespecs (in forward and backward direction).

Besides pagespecs, the rel= attribute could be used for styles. --Ivan Z.

FWIW, the add_link function introduced in a recent release adds an abstraction that could be used to get part of the way there to storing data about different types of links. That function could easily be extended to take an optional third parameter specifying the link type.

Then there's the question of how to store and access the data. %links does not offer a good way to add additional information about links. Now, we could toss %links entirely and switch to an accessor function, but let's think about not doing that..

The data that seems to be needed is basically a deep hash, so one could check $linktype{$page}{tag}{$link} to see if the page contains a link of the given type. (Note that pages could contain links that were duplicates except for their types.)

There would be some data duplication, unfortuantly, but if %linktype is not populated for regular wikilinks, it would at least be limited to tags and other unusual link types, so not too bad.

%linktype could be stored in %pagestate.. if so the actual use might look like $pagestate{$page}{linktype}{tag}{$link}. That could be implemented by the tag plugin right now with no core changes. (BTW, then I originally wrote tag, pagestate was not available, which is why I didn't make it differentiate from normal links.) Might be better to go ahead and add the variable to core though. --[[Joey]]