[Wikitext-l] The <pre> tag

[Mark Clements]

From: "Platonides" <platonides at gmail.com>
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > Would it be reasonable to restrict the use of <pre> to:
> > - General paragraph texts, but not internal or external link captions
> > - Image captions
> >
> > Perhaps anywhere else it could be either treated as equivalent to
> > <nowikI>, ignored, or rendered literally?
>
> IMHO we should differentiate between inline tags and block tags. As
> we're translating wikitext into xhtml, using its same type of
> restriction makes sense.
>
> So an image caption would onmly be allowed to contain inline tags. <pre>
> is a block tag.
>
> We could:
> a) Render <pre> literally [blinking] in red so the user perceives
> there's a syntax error.
> b) Refuse to save (bad).
> c) Use a <span with pre-like format (is it really useful? It means a
> different )
> d) Move the <pre> to the next position where it makes sense.

Or of course:
e) Render it literally without making it look ridiculous.

Here's my thoughts on the above options:
a) No - use (e) instead.
b) Never refuse to save
c) This is a possibility.  However we would need to make this behaviour
consistent across the whole parser, e.g. <pre> tags inside a paragraph
should be treated as in-line as well.  This would possibly be quite useful,
but would no doubt break existing pages.  It is also conceptually a bit
confusing and may cause problems with the default styling rules (which add
padding and borders etc. which may look pretty bad for in-line elements).
d) I don't think this is a good idea - it almost certainly isn't what was
wanted and makes the problem harder to track down.
e) The one I would choose if (c) is not viable.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)