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