[Moin-user] Changing default behavior on downloads.

[Paul Moore]

2008/9/30 Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>:
> Summary - I don't want Moin to render anything other than Wiki markup.

Thinking a little more on this, if we have normal and inline link
types, and the general intention is for normal links to link to a
"rendered" page, then I would argue strongly that a "raw" link type is
needed, which does deliver the item data without rendering.

Some points:
1. To me, "raw" links would be more useful than "rendered" links for
anything other than markup.
2. A raw link could be implemented as a macro. But so could the "rendered" case.
3. Having to use a macro for what is to me, the normal case, seems
backward. But that's a preference issue.
4. The choice of behaviour which is supported by syntax rather than
macros is important - naive users see macros as "complex".

So we could have:

    [[Rendered Page]]
    {{Inline Object}}
    <<Raw(Raw Data)>>

People could probably get used to this, if you insist that non-markup
types should have a specific rendering action. (Question: for how many
mime types do you see core Moin having custom rendering actions? I
assume the default rendering action would be some sort of attachment
manager page?)

Looking at URLs for a moment, I would say there should be a request
parameter to force raw or "rendered" (I dislike this term, I'd rather
say "custom page", but I'll stick with "rendered" as it's your term)
behaviour. So

    http://server/...../MyPage?format=raw       -  would always
generate raw data served with the item's mime type)
    http://server/...../MyPage?format=rendered  - would generate a
custom display page [1]

The unadorned URL http://server/...../MyPage would generate the
rendered form for text/x-moin-wiki (and maybe other markup types), and
the raw form for other mime types.

[1] The custom display is the rendered markup for markup types, a
custom page for certain types which have special code (your zip and
image examples) and a download manager page as default.

I find it relevant that there are only two possible options that can
apply to *all* mime types. These are "raw" and a download manager
page. The "rendered" action can only ever apply to some mime types
(abeit one of these is markup, which is by far the most common type).
Maybe there should be *three* options - ?render=raw, ?render=manager
and ?render=formatted, with the default varying by mime type, so that
without ?render=, the user gets an "appropriate" result. On that
basis, the discussion centres round what counts as "appropriate" -
maybe just exposing that decision in the wiki config is sufficient,
then I would use raw and formatted only with raw as default, and you
would use formatted far more often, and manager as the default. This
comes full circle to Rick's suggestion that we allow ?do=get vs
?do=view to be configurable, and indicates that maybe making that
possible now isn't so far from the likely final form for 2.0. (Or to
put it another way, the ?do problem won't go away in 2.0, people will
still differ in their preferences, so let's implement a configurable
default now, and get some experience of how effective it is before
designing the final UI for 2.0).

Paul.