On Jan 14, 2005, at 11:56 PM, NSK wrote:
Why the <A> XHTML tag is not allowed in wikitext? How this decision was taken?
MediaWiki's formatting is derived from UseMod's, which does not include <a> among the (optional) allowed tag subset. UseMod's formatting is derived from the original wiki's, which does not allow any HTML.
There is already a standard wiki syntax for hyperlinking, leaving little purpose to choosing to support an <a> tag in addition. Supporting the <a> tag would additionally require extra code in the HTML sanitization code to strip javascript: URLs to maintain security.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)