order of fields in defaultContext

[tanyabouman]

The defaultContext makes several fields available in addition to the metadata fields. These extra fields are path, url, title, and body. The body field is always its default definition, but the others can be replaced by the metadata fields of the same name.

Replacing the default title makes sense, and the example site does that. However, I don't know any use cases for changing the value of path or url, and I can easily imagine that accidentally replacing their value could cause broken links.

Would it be an improvement to change the order of the fields in defaultContext so that path and url are not replaceable in the metadata?

[Minoru]

I don't know offhand how these fields are used internally, so can't comment on how dangerous it is to change them.

However, I often find that something that can be done is done by someone, so taking it away breaks their setup. For Hakyll, I sometimes search for "site.hs" on GitHub (thus identifying Hakyll users), and then grep those repos for the bit I'm interested in (something like "^path: " in this case). I'm suggesting you do that to see if someone is (ab)using these meta-fields currently.

[chungyc]

If one does not want the URL to be the straightforward path-based URL, e.g., if one wants clean URLs, then changing the url field makes sense. For example, see https://chungyc.org/article/technical/website/extensionless#directory-urls.

I don't know of any good reason to change the path field, but neither do I know of a good reason to prevent changing it.

[tanyabouman]

Thanks for the information! I'll close the issue because the current state seems good.