Those poor souls who still screen-scrape should
expect
all kinds of breakages anyway.
That's no reason not to warn them ahead of time. Crossposting the notice
to wikibots-l and pywikipedia-l.
A change like wgHtml5=true seems a good time to change the legacy code
to use the api.
Please report anything doable with screen-scrapping but not with
mediawiki api.
Aryeh Gregor writes:
Back in July, we had a lengthy discussion about the
possibility of
switching to HTML5:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/043865.html
The conclusion appeared to be that switching to HTML5 was a good idea.
As of July 12 (r53142), MediaWiki has been outputting HTML5
continuously as the default:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/53142
There have been only a few minor problems reported by various trunk
users, all of which were quickly fixed. The current state of HTML5
support is discussed here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/HTML5
When we had our last scap six weeks ago, $wgHtml5 was disabled on
Wikimedia to reduce the number of variables to keep track of, since a
huge amount of code was changing at once. Although we're currently in
the middle of some organizational issues due to Brion's resignation, I
think it would be safe to experimentally turn on $wgHtml5 and see what
happens. If any problems are reported that can't be fixed
immediately, of course, it could be turned off again, but I think this
is quite unlikely. I'll be available for the next few weeks to work
on any issues that arise. Would this be okay?