Looking at the discussion about [[todo/structured_page_data]], it looks a bit like folks are bogged down in figuring out what *markup* to use for structured page data, something I doubt that people will really agree on. And thus, little progress is made.
I propose that, rather than worry about what the data looks like, that we take a similar approach
to the way Revision Control Systems are used in ikiwiki: a front-end + back-end approach.
The front-end would be a common interface, where queries are made about the structured data,
and there would be any number of back-ends, which could use whatever markup or format that they desired.
To that purpose, I've written the [[plugins/contrib/field]] plugin for a possible front-end.
I called it "field" because each page could be considered a "record" where one could request the values of "fields" of that record.
The idea is that back-end plugins would register functions which can be called when the value of a field is desired.
This is gone into in more depth on the plugin page itself, but I would appreciate feedback and improvements on the approach.
I think it could be really powerful and useful, especially if it becomes part of ikiwiki proper.
--[[KathrynAndersen]]
2009-12-05 07:44:36 +01:00
> It looks like an interesting idea. I don't have time right now to look at it in depth, but it looks interesting. -- [[Will]]
> querying or modifying a page's data if all the data has an implicit type "string". --[[Joey]]
>> I'm not sure that having an implicit type of "string" is really such a bad thing. After all, Perl itself manages with just string and number, and easily converts from one to the other. Strong typing is generally used to (a) restrict what can be done with the data and/or (b) restrict how the data is input. The latter could be done with some sort of validated form, but that, too, could be decoupled from looking up and returning the value of a field. --[[KathrynAndersen]]
