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> -> &lt;script&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
<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

Reply via email to