Discussion on URLs
🗩 I don't like how urls work with Phoebe spaces. It's complicated. By the way, I used to have a similar concept (called mycelia) but it ended up being not needed. I think one should copy MediaWiki with its colon name:spaces if they think this concept is needed. It applies to Phoebe, no doubts.
🗨 Alex: What part of how Phoebe URLs work do you not like? If we expect multiple wikis per domain name, then surely a path prefix is required ("/gemini" in this case). The alternative would be to require a subdomain for every wiki and that generates a lot more work for sysadmins.
How to add a new space illustrates the difference
One reason I want this is because I'm thinking of a site like Campaign Wiki, where every role-playing game campaign gets it's own space. These spaces must be super light to setup. Requiring administrators to do the domain name and certificate setup just right just adds a lot of work.
🗩 Timur: compare this:
/page/a /foo/page/b
It's inconsistent. This is how it would look on MediaWiki:
/wiki/a /wiki/foo:b
I like it more, it's easier to parse. Another approach would be to consider spaces as subpages:
/page/a /page/b
Also, different spaces can be served at different ports but it's impractical.
🗨 Alex: I don't understand the inconsistency argument. There's one space without a name; all others have a name. What are you going to say to these users:
gemini://example.org/~alex/phoebe/page/a gemini://example.org/~berta/wiki/page/b gemini://example.org/~claude/public/code/page/c
If you start looking at it from the end, it's very consistent.
Think about it as separate installations. Most of the time, that's how it should feel.
I don't really use namespaces in Mediawiki so "like Mediawiki" isn't a good argument. On the contrary, the colon introduces more unnecessary syntax.
In this case, if you don't know that foo is a namespace, then this is more to learn:
/wiki/a /wiki/foo:b
This makes more sense to me, because now I don't have to know anything about the underlying technology:
/wiki/a /wiki/foo/b
I did not understand the "spaces as subpages" example. Can you elaborate?
🗩 Timur:
There's one space without a name
That's it! It would be harder to parse it with, for example, a regex.
If you start looking at it from the end, it's very consistent
Yeah, you are right. But I don't really read from the end :-/
I did not understand the "spaces as subpages" example. Can you elaborate?
Say, you have three spaces: the main one, A and B. Every space has a page called Test. This is how you would access them:
/page/Test /page/A/Test /page/B/Test
This syntax is ambiguous, you can't tell what space does a page relate to by looking at its URL; this is why I think it's impractical.
Anyway, Phoebe's URLs are ok, you've convinced me. I'm removing the URL section from the page as there are many different ways of doing it.
Should we move this discussion to a subpage?
🗨 Alex: I guess if you feel that an issue is resolved, we can move the discussion to a different page and link to it, as an archive.