Presently wiki links implement internal links within the federation, using a mechanism we call collaborative links. Here I outline a proposal to extend this mechanism to enable wiki links to open a number of lineup pages.
# Rational
Lineup pages are a fundamental structure in the federation. Using the lineup you can present a series of relate thoughts in a single view regardless of the source of origin of the data.
This is a primary feature of working in wiki, but at present it's use is limited as you are unable to pass around these collections of links and ideas to other authors.
An author wishes to be able to say:
"Look - here are three pages that explain what I am saying"
These pages may show data, or compare pages, or otherwise provide a view which is not possible to express using a single wiki page.
# Implementation
There are a number of capabilities that would be of utility here, but the simplest to implement and to comprehend as an author is to enable multiple pages withing the current site of origin to be displayed using an internal wiki link.
Currently the syntax for an internal link is:
We are proposing that this be extended to include links of the following form:
The existing code would be modified to iterate through each path item, and display the first item in the usual way for an internal link, and then open up the second item to the right of the first and so forth.
# Welcome Visitors
Now that we have a working version of Read Only Wiki, we should rescue the functionality of the Welcome Visitors Page.
There are a number of things to say about this, but the primary fix here is to add configurable routing to a site (using the Status Folder in the sites document root), to alter the routing of the Node server so that call to the domain will open multiple lineup items should this configuration be non-empty.