On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 12:09 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Aryeh mentioned that Wikimedia wikis still aren't
using HTML5. I know it was
enabled a few times and is currently disabled. As far as I remember, the
biggest issue was third-party tools and such, which seemed solvable by
announcing the change early (letting any developers know that
test.wikipedia.org is using HTML5 currently, of course) and then making the
switch a few weeks later. Is that generally correct, and if so, can we start
that process? If that's not correct, what are the outstanding issues?
There are three major classes of issues that are likely to arise:
1) Visual artifacts due to switching from an almost-standards doctype
to a standards doctype.
2) Breakage of XML parsing due to the doctype not having a DTD that
includes HTML entities.
3) Bugs in features that are $wgHtml5-only, which haven't been tested
on Wikipedia until now.
The way to go about switching would be to first change from an XHTML
Transitional doctype to XHTML Strict. That will trigger only issues
of type (1), which should be minor and easy to fix.
Once that's working, switch to <!DOCTYPE html>, still without enabling
$wgHtml5. This will probably cause XML-based screen scrapers to break
due to stray named entities. Developers should be on hand to track
down and promptly fix any hitherto-unspotted sources of named
entities. This will probably cause temporary breakage of various
bots, but it shouldn't be for long if there's adequate notice and
developers are on hand to fix problems as soon as they're reported.
Finally, switching $wgHtml5 to true will actually enable all the HTML5
features, which is the goal. This will probably cause a variety of
minor issues, such as breaking regex screen-scrapers and changing
appearance or features slightly in a bunch of ways. Unless there are
major regex screen-scrapers that happen to be expecting things like
type="text/css" that are removed when $wgHtml5 is true, this probably
won't cause any big issues, but if we want to be on the safe side,
people should be paying attention when the switch is flipped just in
case.
The two times $wgHtml5 has been enabled before, it had to be shut off
due to (2), so I suspect that's the biggest issue. (1) and (3) are
likely to be minor. But it shouldn't be a huge deal to switch, with a
little planning and preparation, if someone with shell access and a
developer or two are interested. The changes themselves are trivial,
you just need someone who knows about the potential issues to be on
hand to fix them as they're reported and deploy the fixes.