Feedback on ProtocolTlaPlugin

What It's For

This really was a midnight hack, to see how far twiki could go. But it is somewhat useful, in order to linkify everything. Though the linking, at current, is ridiculously ugly.

Known Issues

• v1310
  • not all acronyms are included this time.
    • Some on purpose, but some apparently aren't matching with the code gen regex.
  • I included only the IETF portions. The rest was too incomplete.
  • testing is sporatic and it shows, because IPv6 doesn't seem to match correctly.
  • The huge parser problem is recursive matching in endRenderingHandler; example:
    • XYZ which renders to "{a href="..."}blah ABC blah{/a}" will destroy the anchor when the ABC match is expanded.
    • Only known alternative is to use line-by-line matching?? which would be waaay too slow.
    • Well the other alternative is to require surrounding markup, i.e. whitespace doesn't cut it.
  • this version uses a comma in front, and I didn't check to see if that conflicts with anything else.
  • Linkification on the form fails for any rfc docnum less than 1000 (i.e. likely need to remove zero padding)

To Do List for Future Versions

• The interface bites. The goal: to provide info & links while preserving the visual rendering, i.e. the only action occurs with onmouseover.
  • an alternative is javascript onmouseover expanding menu. (Anyone have suggestions? or code? please?)
  • an alternative is to use title (but that won't allow multiple links)
  • alternative is to use stuff from ToolTipPlugin
• Need to clean up the "auto-summarize" part of the code gen tool, so summaries are displayed.
• package the code generator as part of the plugin.

How It Works

Below is the regex for matching acronyms in RFC titles. It runs on the "active-rfc" web page at ietf.org. The rest of the implementation should be obvious.

while (s/
            \b
                (
#                (
# find 'IP' through 'ABBREV' 
                    ([A-Z]{2,7})
                |
# find 'L2TP' or 'A2B'
                ([A-Z]{1,7}\d[A-Z]{1,7})
                |
# find WebDAV through IPoA
                ([A-Z]{1,7}[a-z]{1,7}[A-Z]{1,7})
                |
# find abcDEF
                ([a-z]{1,7}[A-Z]{1,7})
#                )
# with optional 'v\d' on end:  IPv6  LDAPv2  DHCPv4
# with optional '-ABBREV' on end
# with optional 'abc' on end: IPsec
                    (
                        ([v]?\d+)*
                        (-[A-Z]{2,7})*
                        ([a-z]{2,7})*
                    )
                )
                //xo) {
            $protocols .= $1." ";
        }

Comments Appreciated

-- JonathanCline - 28 Aug 2003

checked .pm into CVS

-- WillNorris - 19 Jul 2005