bad wiki timeline link

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 8, 2015, at 2:44 AM, Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: John Ralls [mailto:jralls at ceridwen.us]
>> Sent: Saturday, 1 August 2015 9:42 AM
>> To: Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au>
>> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> Subject: Re: bad wiki timeline link
>> 
>>> On Jul 31, 2015, at 2:01 PM, Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> On page
>>> http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Documentation_Update_Instructions, link
>> http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/timeline doesn't work.
>>> 
>>> If some-one can tell me what it should be or if it should be removed,
>>> I'll update it?
>>> 
>>> Please copy me on the reply as I only get daily gnucash-user mail.
>> 
>> We’re not using trac any more, so it should be removed. I don’t see anything
>> in that page that says anything about it, so it doesn’t need replacing, either.
>> 
>> If you have time it would be nice to convert those references into proper
>> footnotes or embedded links.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> AFAICT the Wiki Cite extension (footnotes) is designed more for citing actual published papers or books rather than URLs as the text you put ref tags around is shown in the automatically generated footnote.
> 
> It seems to me (maybe I'm getting totally the wrong impression), some people (not naming anyone in particular Geert...) prefer to not have the actual URL in the body of the text, just in the footnote.
> 
> I'm OK with adding the URL where it is first referenced, so it could also appear in the footnotes. Anybody have objections?

My preference in most cases to to make the first ref to a webpage a link with [http://foo.bar/baz name] and then just use name everywhere else. I can envision exceptions but have never actually encountered any when writing.

For the Documents Update page someone in the dark past decided to do it differently, perhaps envisioning that someone might go to a particular part of the procedure and not want to look back for the first instance of a reference. IIUC the Cite extension allows you to create a footnote with regular wiki text so that you can embed the URL in the footnote. Following it becomes a two-step process, but there’s only one instance of the URL to maintain. But perhaps I don’t understand correctly…

Regards,
John Ralls