On 13/08/15 15:43, MZMcBride wrote: > Or could we replace Tidy with nothing? Relying on the principle of > "garbage in, garbage out" seems reasonable in some ways. And modern > browsers are fairly adept at handling moderately bad HTML.
The HTML 5 spec makes a distinction between valid, balanced HTML and error recovery algorithms. Browsers are basically the only clients able to handle moderately bad HTML, and as I've previously said in discussions of HTML 5 output, I don't think it is acceptable to screw over all non-browser clients by sending output that relies on obscure details of the HTML 5 spec. I think XHTML or something close to it is an appropriate machine-readable output format. Have you looked at my survey on the bug? Compliant HTML 5 parsers are 10-30k source lines and are in pretty short supply. Wikitext is not meant to be easily machine-readable, it is meant to be easily human-writable. Unbalanced tags in HTML are errors, but in wikitext they are allowed. This is a design choice. Most humans don't really care about the spec, they just want the machine to figure out what they meant. And, as several others have noted, you can't just disable Tidy, since the effects of unclosed tags are not confined to the content area, and there is a large amount of existing content that depends on it. I have seen the effects of Tidy being accidentally disabled on the English Wikipedia, it is not pleasant. Am I correct in saying that MZMcBride is the only person in this thread in favour of the idea of getting rid of HTML cleanup? By the way, you can see my work in progress on an HTML reserializer web service in the mediawiki/services/html5depurate project on Gerrit: <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:open+project:mediawiki/services/html5depurate+branch:master,n,z> -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
