Last modified: 2014-07-15 00:08:56 UTC
This is a long-term request. The idea would be, basically, that namespaces like Image and Category would no longer be magical. Probably this would be achieved by something like making an abstract Namespace class that would have functions like renderLink() and transclude(), so that these could behave differently for different namespaces. (These would probably call functions of a Skin object passed to them.) Thus Image/Category NSes wouldn't be special-cased in the parser, but instead it would ask them to render the links and they would do something appropriate. Benefits: it's a moderately common request to have other namespaces that behave like images, etc. (e.g., bug 2194). This is currently impossible. It's also substantially cleaner and possibly more expected to not have special-casing hardcoded everywhere. Extensions such as SMW that may want special behavior for certain namespaces will also have a potentially cleaner way to do it. Etc. Probably not very high-priority, but IMO it would be nice if we did this eventually.
Chad, could you help assessing this old request and whether we might be doing anything about it? Otherwise we should probably assign Lowest priority to reflect the situation so far.
Nobody's ever done anything with this. In theory, some of the content handler stuff might've opened the door to making this easier, but the original request (having secondary file or category namespaces) certainly is not possible.
After a year of silence... I'm daring to resolve this request as WONTFIX, as there is no plan or sign of willing to change the attributes currently hardcoded to certain MediaWiki namespaces.
Just because nobody's scratched the itch doesn't mean the bug isn't valid. Someone could very well come along and do this.
