On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Platonides <[email protected]> wrote:
> That's no reason not to warn them ahead of time. Crossposting the notice
> to wikibots-l and pywikipedia-l.
>
> A change like wgHtml5=true seems a good time to change the legacy code
> to use the api.
>
> Please report anything doable with screen-scrapping but not with
> mediawiki api.

I don't expect any bots to break, even if they screen-scrape.  The
actual changes to HTML output are minimal -- a different doctype, a
few useless elements and attributes dropped.  Unless your script
relies on the fact that all <script> elements have
type="text/javascript" or something similarly crazy, you should be
fine even if you screen-scrape.

Switching $wgWellFormedXml to false would certainly break
screen-scrapers that rely on XML parsing libraries.  However, I don't
propose we do this right now -- I'm only suggesting we output HTML5,
not cease outputting well-formed XML.  Eventually, perhaps, we should
consider dropping XML output, especially once HTML5 parsing libraries
are more readily available, but not in the foreseeable future.

The only breakage I can foresee would be caused by the switch from
"almost standards" to "standards" mode.  But the difference is pretty
minor (far more minor than quirks vs. almost standards), and I don't
expect anything to break seriously, or in a way that can't be quickly
fixed.  No trunk users (TranslateWiki, etc.) have reported any
outstanding problems that I know of.

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