path: root/doc/todo/toplevel_index.mdwn

Some inconsistences around the toplevel [[index]] page:

[[ikiwiki]] is a separate page; links to [[ikiwiki]] should better go to
the [[index]] though.
The toplevel [[ikiwiki/Discussion]] page has some weird parentlinks
behavior. This could be special cased around with the following patch.
However, I'm unsure if I like the idea of more special cases around this.
It would be better to find a way to make the toplevel index page not be a
special case at all.

Here is a patch:
--- IkiWiki/Render.pm   (revision 1187)
+++ IkiWiki/Render.pm   (working copy)
@@ -71,6 +71,7 @@
        my $path="";
        my $skip=1;
        return if $page eq 'index'; # toplevel
+       $path=".." if $page=~s/^index\///;
        foreach my $dir (reverse split("/", $page)) {
                if (! $skip) {
                        $path.="../";



I would like to suggest another tack, namely a bigger, better special case.
The basic idea is that all indices of the form foo/bar/index get the wiki path foo/bar.
This makes some things more elegant:

All files having to do with foo/bar are in the foo/bar directory, rather
than the (admittedly minor) wart of having the index be in foo/.
This sort of addresses [[bugs/broken_parentlinks]] in that example/ is
guaranteed to be a valid path. (There might be no index there, though.)
This is more in line with standard HTML practice, as far as I understand it,
namely that linking to a/b means a/b/index.html rather than a/b.html.

This would change the inline plugin in strange ways -- I think if foo/index.html
contains [[inline "* and !*/Discussion"]], it should skip inlining foo/index.html
explicitly, but would inline index pages in child directories
foo/bar/baz/index.html as bar/baz.
It always bothers me that foo/bar/ files need a foo/bar.html in front of them,
rather than a foo/bar/index.html, as is (to my mind) traditional.
Ethan
Hmm, now I've had time to think about this, and this does conflict pretty hard with foo.html/Discussion
pages. Well, back to the drawing board.
Well, it seems unlikely that you'll have both foo/bar.html and foo/bar/index.html,
so why not accept either as foo/bar? This would both preserve backwards
compatibility, as well as allow foo/bar/Discussion.
Ethan
No, in order for this to work, the wiki path foo/bar/baz could be any of:

foo/bar/baz.html
foo/index/bar/index/baz.html
foo/bar/index/baz.html
foo/bar/index/baz/index.html

Or many others. Which is probably even hackier than having both foo.html and foo/.
Ethan