Talk:Markup spec/BNF/Article title

canonical title

Now that there are no database dumps, is it useful to call the one in the DB, which nobody has access to, canonical? It seems the format in the XML dump would be a better choice; espcially since when it's of the form x:y, interpreting x is non-trivial. -Sanbeg 17:53, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm... I would say yes. I am pretty sure that this is still the go-between format for titles within the software. If you think about it this makes sense - if you have a title that can be in four formats A, B, C and D it makes much more sense to have 6 conversion functions (B->A, C->A, D->A, A->B, A->C, A->D) than to have the 12 functions it would need to arbitrarily convert any one format to any other. So when MW receives the title in URL format, it converts the supplied title into canonical form, and then converts the canonical form to a human-readable form for display at the top of the page. --HappyDog 23:54, 10 August 2006 (UTC)