Also sprach Aryeh Gregor:
> > http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/ref/
> This looks good overall.
Thanks.
> 1) A problem we often tend to have with this kind of thing is that
> users write lots of custom CSS and JS that depends on the exact
> elements used, which breaks if we change the markup. For instance, I
> find the following rules in the English Wikipedia's custom stylesheet:
>
> sup.reference:target {
> background-color: #DEF;
> }
> /* stop references with groups from line-breaking */
> sup.reference a {white-space: nowrap;}
The selectors would have to be rewritten to match the revised markup:
a.ref:target { background-color: #DEF }
a.ref { white-space: nowrap }
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.css>
>
> These would break if we got rid of the <sup>, on the English Wikipedia
> and possibly on tons of other wikis as well. This makes me reluctant
> to do that.
It's easy enough to rewrite, and the worst-case scenario is a minor
stylistic change for some users. In the best case, the markup and the
style sheet are changed in sync.
> 2) I notice you used "font-size: 85%; vertical-align: 35%" instead of
> the CSS2.1 recommended value for sup, "font-size: 83%; vertical-align:
> sup". Is there any particular reason for this?
Indeed, CSS 2.1 proposes [1]:
sup { vertical-align: super }
However, with this value, some legacy browsers (IE6/IE7) place the
footnote call slightly higher than Wikipedia currently uses. So, the
35% value was chosen as it seems to result in "pixel-perfect"
renditions. I would be equally happy with the "super" value.
The 85% value is semi-arbitrary, I've changed it to 83% which seems to
work equally well.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/sample.html
> Specifically, one important objective for such a change would be
> that line-spacing shouldn't be changed, and I'd have to test that
> in various browsers to avoid regression there.
Yes.
> 3) Some of the changes you recommend actually aren't software issues,
> but customizations by the particular wiki's sysops. In particular,
> the extra <span>s around the square brackets are specific to enwiki:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Cite_reference_link&action=history
>
> So is the <b>:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Cite_references_link_one&action=history
Interesting. No good reasons are given. Hmm.
> In the default software, they don't exist. To get rid of them, you'd
> want to make a suggestion on wikien-l, the enwiki Village Pump, or a
> similar forum. wikitech-l is mostly for the developers and sysadmins,
> who can't really affect what particular communities choose to do in
> this sort of thing.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
> 4) The reason we have an <a> inside a <sup> turns out to be because in
> wikimarkup, you can't give custom attributes to <a>. The markup used
> for the message is wikimarkup, which simply cannot achieve your
> suggested HTML output. We'd have to move this to raw HTML to allow
> it, which would mean hardcoding it into the software, since we don't
> like to give sysops access to output raw HTML (to reduce the chance of
> invalid markup -- they can add arbitrary JS anyway, so XSS isn't
> really an issue). This would probably annoy people, since they've
> already customized it. Or we'd have to add support for explicit <a>
> to wikimarkup -- maybe a good idea, but also a bigger project.
I'm happy to be put in the "bigger project" category -- I'm here for
the long term -- centuries :-)
> I do like your proposed markup, and think it would be great if we
> could move to simpler and more semantic markup overall, but it's not
> clear to me how to best go about implementing most of it. I've at
> least removed the empty title="" attribute, in r49075. Of the rest,
> some I can't do: it's up to enwiki sysops. And one bit (giving
> attributes to the <a> element) wouldn't work at all without some
> potentially significant unrelated changes. But it would be nice if we
> could move more in this direction, definitely.
Thanks for your considered reply.
Cheers,
-h&kon
Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª
howc...@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
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