On Saturday, August 15, 2015, MZMcBride <[email protected]> wrote: > Robert Rohde wrote: >>Some years back I was importing a large number of complex templates to a >>wiki that didn't have tidy enabled. The results were nothing short of >>horrendous in a substantial number of cases. Wiki authors will generally >>stop worrying about their code as long as the results look right. For >>good or ill, tidy does a remarkable job of localizing unclosed tags, and >>often that is enough to effectively fix the appearance of broken HTML >>syntax so it doesn't spill over into other sections. Without Tidy (or >>its equivalent) there will be a lot of template garbage that needs to be >>repaired. > > As we get saner input mechanisms (CodeEditor, VisualEditor, ScoreEditor, > etc.), we'll likely see a reduction in direct HTML editing, which seems to > be what most often results in introducing layout-disrupting invalid input.
I dont know about that. Viz editor is targeting ordinary tasks. Its the complex things that mess stuff up. > >>The garbage in -> garbage out approach might seem appealing in principle, >>but any transition to such a condition is going to dredge up a lot of >>malformed HTML code created by wiki editors that we've been hiding for >>many years. If one is going to replace Tidy with something substantially >>different in execution, I would suggest that one needs a significant test >>suite of complex pages in order to judge how bad the collateral damage is >>likely to be, and ideally some set of tools to help editors fix it. > > I think dredging up bad input in order to fix it is appropriate. A > transition period could include the ability to temporarily render a page > without Tidy enabled to see what issues present themselves. As I said > previously, browsers are fairly resilient to moderately bad input, but > even the really bad code should probably be properly addressed via the > wiki process instead of being glossed over with magical fixes and > replacements in the form of Tidy. > > In addition to following the garbage principle, we would also be following > the idea of failing fast and loudly, if the layout gets borked by a missing > tag, for example. Failing fast and loud is good in lots of contexts. I dont think wiki editing is one of them. > > (In continuing to think about this problem generally and how other > sites/platforms have solved or mitigated it, it's amusing to me that we > allow div, span, and inline styling and arbitrary attributes (both of > which require separate sanitization), and yet we continue to disallow > rendering of the anchor element.) > Afaik, anchors are disallowed because spammers commonly insert them. Its trivial to sanitize and allow them if we so desired. -- bawolff > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
