Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:03 UTC
Specifying `action=render` for any page title other than one starting with `Special:` returns all XHTML that would normally appear inside of the `bodyContent` div. It would be nice if this worked with Special pages, too.
Please give an example of how this would be useful.
Rendering pages through action=render is much faster. It would also help out bot designers.
1. No, it's not 2. Bots should be using machine-readable interfaces, e.g. the API, or special handlers for "action=raw" or similar
This would make it easier to dynamically retrieve content on special pages with AJAX. For example, I am writing a script that displays subpages on the deletion log. Loading the entire page makes it more difficult to work with, and increases loading time for content that's stripped from the output anyway. &action=raw does not work on special pages, apparently because they are not output through the parser. That would be the ideal solution, combined with machine-readable XML output (using the associated &ctype), but it sounds like that would be difficult to implement. &action=render would probably be much easier to implement, since it may not involve changing the parser (only not displaying the surrounding skin). I looked for a machine-readable interface with Special:Prefixindex-like functionality, but couldn't find one.
Special pages are always assumed to be viewed; the entire path of execution is passed off to the special page execution function, which will then determine what action to take based on parameters, often from a POST. It doesn't have anything to do with the parser. Since a special page contains no "content", asking for it to be "rendered" doesn't make as much sense. Both cases presented indicate the need to develop our API and other machine-readable interfaces further, not add kludges to the code to output "bits of the page".
I did not know that there was an API. Sorry about this ...
*** Bug 13478 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
