I think that it should be possible to have TransparencyInIdentifiers. Although it should be possible to create internal and external links, it should also be possible to create what appears to be an external link that is, in fact, and internal link, and vice versa.

TWiki allows links to be made to to pages LinkToPage or to explicitly identified locations within pages LinkToPage#LinkWithinPage. The former are external, the latter are internal.

PurpleNumbers automatically create identifiers within pages.

This is good. We should be able to identify any element, boundary, or set of elements within a page.

However, occasionally transparency, implicit rather than excplicit, is needed. For example, I might create a page SomePage, and later realize that all references to SomePage should be redirected to SomeOtherPage#InternalLink. Page redirects handle this reasonably well...

And vice versa... I might start off with an internal link SomePage, and then, during refactoring, make a page SomeOtherPage. I might then want to redirect all links to SomePage redirected to SomeOtherPage. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I do not see how to do this in TWiki using redirects. Still, one can imagine a redirect that would accomplish this.

In the long run, redirects are not the final solution. Page names get allocated, deallocated, and reused. If a redirected link is reused for some other purpose, the redirects are broken. There needs to be an operation that renames SomePage#SomeInternalLink to SomeExternalLink, and vice versa.

-- Contributors: AndyGlew

Discussion

-- AndyGlew - 20 Mar 2006