Document Subscription Ideas

This page is a "scratchpad" for the purpose of exposing and discussing ideas for future changes in DocumentSubscription? behavior. It is transient; it will be deleted once decisions are made and/or implemented.

My goals for DocumentSubscription? are as follows:

Once RecentChanges gets too cluttered to be useful, I want everyone to be able to construct their own subscription lists out of categories of pages that they want to read. So, someone might create several personal category pages containing subscription lists, like the following:

ScottMoonen/Favorites contains [[[!][FavoritePageOne, FavoritePageTwo]]]

ScottMoonen/Theology contains [[[!][TheologyPageOne, TheologyPageTwo]]]

One could then pull all these together into one subscription list, along with any other system-wide categories one wanted to read:

ScottMoonen/Subscriptions containing [[[@][ScottMoonen/Favorites, ScottMoonen/Theology, CategoryHumor]]]

Note that I haven't yet implemented this functionality, but it would create a subscription list out of all the pages subscribed to within the named pages. I.e., the above meta-list would display FavoritePageOne, FavoritePageTwo, TheologyPageOne, TheologyPageTwo, in addition to whatever pages belonged to CategoryHumor.

Older ideas (some already implemented)

I want to do something like the following:

Implement a transclusion-esque tag like ##. . .## that transcludes a page's contents. E.g., ##CategoryMeta## would in-line the contents of the page CategoryMeta?. Unresolved: How do we prevent infinite recursive expansion?

Instead of implementing categories as metadata attached to each document, implement them as pages that contain a subscription list (as well as possibly other text). The subscription list describes completely all members of the category: category membership is not determined by inclusion of the text [[CategorySomething]] on a page.

Implement some expansion to the namespace whereby a document can possess "sub-documents" (in the same vein as MeatBall:SubPage?). The namespace qualifier could be a colon or something to that effect.

This achieves:

MeatBall:PersonalCategories?
Transclusion (e.g., GeorgeClark can now type the Greek form of logos in a personal page and use it anywhere by writing ##GeorgeClark:logos##.

Questions or Problems:

No reason we *have* to lose RecentChanges to use DocumentSubscription??

*Naah, I'm just thinking ahead to the time when RecentChanges is so swamped that nobody wants to visit it. Sometime, um, a few decades from now. ;-)

How do we easily determine (or indicate) what categories a page belongs to when we visit it?
How do we define a simple mechanism for category maintenance? Especially adding pages to a category. Perhaps make the "subscribe" field a comma-separated list of category names.
How do we prevent recursive expansion of a transclusion?
Do we wish to somehow differentiate between documents and sub-documents?

*Can only sub-documents be transcluded?

*Can only documents contain transclusions?

*Can you subscribe to sub-documents? Will they appear in a RecentChanges-esque listing (i.e., can one subscribe to a sub-document)? Categories belonging to categories, I guess. ;-)

*Can documents contain subscription lists?

How do we implement a "none-of-the-above"-type subscription?
(Off the wall) Is there any way we can modify this idea to implement inter-wiki links, given that we may be partitioning the namespace in the same manner? Or is it better just to leave those as-is, defined in a separate text file? Can we allow the namespaces to overlap, or will we run into problems?

DocumentSubscriptionIdeas