Paul Johnson wrote:
On Thursday 17 February 2005 12:00 pm, Frank Wales wrote:
Exactly. For patients who care more than their browsers do about irrelevant inconsistencies in XHTML, I suggest a course of HTML Tidy: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
Forgive me if I misread this thread, but given that MediaWiki *is* XHTML 1.0 Transitional out of the box, what benefit does it bring us to make it no longer XHTML compliant? And what can tidy do that validator.w3.org can't do?
validator.w3.org is a web service where you submit pages and it spits out error messages telling you what's wrong with it if it doesn't validate according to the advertised version of (X)HTML.
HTML Tidy is a program where you hand it some chunk of (X)HTML that may or may not validate properly and it tries to fix it up for you to produce output that will validate if the original contained errors. (It can do other junk too like pretty indentation of nested markup.)
MediaWiki can optionally shell out to tidy as a postprocessing step after wikitext->XHTML conversion, as currently we do not guarantee that output will validate. (We make some effort to make sure output is well-formed, but there are probably still failures in well-formedness too. Validation is much harder, as there are nesting rules and limitations on what attribute values are valid.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)