<div>Original thread: <a href="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-August/054603.html">http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-August/054603.html</a></div><br clear="all">Sumana Harihareswara<br>
Volunteer Development Coordinator<br>Wikimedia Foundation<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="font-size: large; font-weight: bold;">Forwarded conversation</span><br>Subject: <b class="gmail_sendername">[Wikitech-l] Cleaning up deprecated html in WikiText</b><br>------------------------<br>
<br><span class="undefined"><font color="#888">From: <b class="undefined">Daniel Friesen</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lists@nadir-seen-fire.com">lists@nadir-seen-fire.com</a>></span><br>Date: Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 5:39 AM<br>
To: Wikimedia developers <<a href="mailto:wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org">wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org</a>><br></font><br></span><br>Right now in wide usage on wiki markup like so is used:<br>
{|<br>
|-<br>
|valign=top width=100%|<br>
|}<br>
<br>
The bgcolor, cellpadding, cellspacing, valign, align, width, height,<br>
etc... presentational attributes have all been completely removed from<br>
html5 and pages using these attributes aren't valid.<br>
<br>
There's no way we'll expect all the instances of valign and width to<br>
disappear from every wiki on their own. And frankly in the context of<br>
authoring WikiText I don't believe the user should have to care about<br>
that and be forced to write a longer style line.<br>
<br>
What are people's opinions on the idea of taking these removed<br>
presentational attributes, and turning them into sugared parts of<br>
WikiText that are output as actual css in the output.<br>
<br>
The change would essentially mean that this:<br>
|valign=top width=100%|<br>
Would become:<br>
<td style="vertical-align: top; width: 100%;"><br>
Instead of this:<br>
<td valign="top" width="100%"><br>
<br>
<br>
I can only find one downside. Text browsers like w3m do make use of<br>
valign but don't support css, hence the change does make the valign<br>
revert to normal vertically centered alignment.<br>
I should make a few notes:<br>
- This doesn't even affect all text browsers. lynx doesn't display<br>
tables in a tabular form and hence doesn't care what type of alignment<br>
attributes you have.<br>
- This has absolutely nothing to do with web accessibility; Screen<br>
readers output to things like audio and braille, and hence don't display<br>
things visually so alignment means nothing to them. And w3 appears to<br>
restrict users with poor eyesight to proper css capable browsers.<br>
Standards for web accessibility for users with poor eyesight seams<br>
focused on things like ensuring usability with screen zooms and larger<br>
fonts, rather than expecting users with bad eyesight to use text browsers.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [<a href="http://daniel.friesen.name" target="_blank">http://daniel.friesen.name</a>]<br>
<br>
<br>
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</font><br>----------<br><span class="undefined"><font color="#888">From: <b class="undefined">Daniel Kinzler</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:daniel@brightbyte.de">daniel@brightbyte.de</a>></span><br>Date: Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 6:13 AM<br>
To: <a href="mailto:daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com">daniel@nadir-seen-fire.com</a>, Wikimedia developers <<a href="mailto:wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org">wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org</a>><br></font><br></span><br>This sounds good to me.<br>
<br>
<br>
I'd like to take this opportunity to once more float the idea of having two<br>
types of "tables" in wikitext:<br>
<br>
* "grids" used for layout, that can be nested, and may be rendered as html<br>
tables but would better be rendered using divs with appropriate styles.<br>
<br>
* actual data tables, which can not contain block elements in their cells (and<br>
can not be nested), for actual tabular data.<br>
<br>
i think this would make for cleaner wiki text and for cleaner html output.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
-- daniel<br>
</font><div><div></div></div><br></div><br>