On 11-08-09 04:01 PM, John Elliot wrote: > On 10/08/2011 8:55 AM, Chad wrote: >> Most of our users won't know or care whether their pages validate. >> Those that do presumably know how to use a validator already. > Isn't an unstated goal of MediaWiki/Wikipedia to decrease ignorance? > > If you already know how to use a validator you might still be pleased to > have it easily integrated for you. WikiText != (X)HTML
<br> -> <br /> <ul> -> nothing (user generated empty lists are killed) <script></script> -> <script></script> <b>a<i>b</b>c</i> -> <b>a<i>b</i></b><i>c</i> In the interest of letting you output things like <div>s, and outputting things like lists with requirements that can't be fulfilled with the built-in syntaxes WikiText includes a SUBSET of HTML. Since it's impractical to re-invent the syntax for all of the stuff you may want to output into the content of your page. However we DO NOT just output this. Everything a user inputs is preprocessed and run though an entire parser. That <br>, the handling that decides that the end result of that should be a br tag in the right syntax for the XHTML or HTML5 output is the WikiText parser, not a html parser. WikiText is a loose syntax, and by the time (X)HTML is output that entire subset of HTML you have in your page has been parsed by MW's Preprocessor which has decided what (SG|HT|X)ML like structures should semantically mean and pieced together the markup. Incorrectly formed html will already have been re-formed to be correct and only interpretable one way. WikiText is loose so instead of errors, if the parser doesn't like something you inputted it's not going to pass that through raw and let a html validator say it's wrong, it's going to decide it doesn't like it and treat it as plaintext. By the time the parser is done with your input MediaWiki will have already re-formed or rejected any of your errors in your page, and the last thing you'll care about is a html validator, it'll be the way your page looks after MediaWiki has rejected tags and outputted some tags as plaintext. Frankly... Fixing our abuse of : (definition lists) for talk page indentation is probably a higher priority than getting the few things like use of obsolete valign attributes that will cause a validator to revolt to validate. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name] _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
