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Scott,
CamelCase is just a convention used by some wikis to "markup" a link.
There are some problems with CamelCase, as we encountered. As an
alternative, Freelinking supports the double square bracket syntax to
create a link.
As I pointed out in an earlier post:
Social software like Wikis and Folksonomies succeed because they allow
the content and tagging to happen more organically. Linking is a case
in point. One of the defining characteristics of wikis is the automatic
link handling. To create a link, you just have to type a CamelCase
phrase, or surround a phrase with some delimiter (usually [[...]]). If
a page with a matching title already exists, a link is automatically
created. If the page title is changed, the links are automatically
updated [although this is not true of Freelinking]. If a matching page
doesn't exist, it will be automatically created when the link is
clicked. All very simple, and easily picked up by users.
Contrast this with traditional web page linking (as implemented by
default in Drupal):
- Add some text
- Select the text
- Open a hyperlink dialog
- Type in a well formed URL (often requiring that you navigate to the
target page and copy and paste the URL from the address bar)
Four steps (each with several sub-steps) vs. the single step of typing a
CamelCase or delimited phrase, not to mention that creating a link is
*also* the way you create a page - much simpler than the default model
of creating a new story page in Drupal.
I did run across a proposal to disable CamelCase linking in Freelinking
- see http://drupal.org/node/25986. But it's not clear if that feature
is available in the version we're using. It seems that the more
successful Wikis (e.g. Wikipedia, based on MediaWiki) don't use
CamelCase at all.
Regards,
Jerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Prentice [mailto:sp@leximation.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 9:44 AM
To: Carol Geyer
Cc: dita-fa-edboard@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [dita-fa-edboard] DITA wiki
Regarding the Freelinking .. I think I'm just not getting the concept
(I'm only fundamentally familiar with wikis, so perhaps that's why).
What makes camel case words more important than other words, and why
would we expect that there would be a page to link to for every camel
case word?
Regarding Freelinking in links .. yes, if the first word in a link is
camel case, it gets freelinked and the intended link is wiped out. But
if there are camel case words anywhere in a link, those become freelinks
and you end up with two links (one the intended link and the other the
freelink), which seems very confusing to me. If possible, perhaps we can
disallow freelinking within a hard-coded link?
As a side-note .. I've noticed that users can change the "theme" that
they view the site with. If you change it to "bluemarine," the
IE-text-selection problem goes away. This could be an option for those
people that use IE and are bothered by this bug. However, if we provide
multiple themes for people to select, we should make sure that each is
branded properly and has reasonable default formatting. (Right now, the
"bluemarine" theme is still in the default mode with Drupal logo, etc.)
...scott
Carol Geyer wrote:
>Okay, I turned freelinking back on, and I have a meeting with Greg at
2:00 today to discuss our options.
>
>Just so I communicate this correctly, are these assumptions valid:
>
>1. The functionality that we're lacking at this point is the ability
>for users to easily (preferably intuitively) create new pages on the
>site that are directly linked from other pages. A wiki appears to be
>the most intuitive way to enable that (people are used to wikis). We're
willing to consider any solution that will provide this
functionality--the freelinking module, a different wiki, or another
Drupal module (taxonomies, etc.)--as long as it's something that can
easily be understood by users.
>
>2. Freelinking creates a link out of any CamelCase word, but linking
that word to a new page isn't intuitive.
>
>3. Alternatively with freelinking, you can use the double bracket
>syntax: [[page title]], which provides an explicit indicator that a
link is needed, but if you change the title of the target page, the
links to that page break.
>
>4. When creating a link to an external page, if the first word in the
>link is CamelCase, the external link gets wiped out and replaced with
the automated internal link; we need a way to override this.
>
>
>Anything else?
>
>Thanks,
>Carol
>
>______________________________
>Carol Geyer
>Director of Communications
>OASIS
>Voice: +1.978.667.5115 x209
>
>OASIS Symposium: The Meaning of Interoperability, 9-12 May, San
>Francisco http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium_2006/
>
>
>
>
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