Plans for shifting Wikimedia to HTML5, probably starting with en:wp Main Page.
(Simetrical is quite keen on this change, as apart from anything else it'll cut our served page size *after gzipping* by 5-20%.)
HTML5 is the new HTML standard. It's specifically been written be backward compatible with most of the horrible quirks in all past browsers - it's a vendor-driven standard - and now it's the W3C official future of HTML. So nothing should break for anyone. Note provisions in below plan in case something does.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com Date: 2009/7/10 Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal: switch to HTML 5 To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Apparently something ate my last post here. (I think it was my Chromium nightly build.) Okay, reposting from memory:
After discussion with Brion on IRC, I've provisionally enabled an HTML 5 doctype in r53034:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/53034
My thoughts on what we should do in the immediate future are:
1) Get at least the enwiki Main Page set up so it will validate as HTML 5 when we scap: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=HTML5&group=0
1a) Remove border="0" from Wikimedia's $wgCopyrightIcon (it does nothing anyway).
1b) Rope some enwiki sysops into getting rid of all cellpadding, cellspacing, align, and clear attributes on the Main Page (converting them to CSS).
2) Scap (whenever this happens -- maybe not so immediate future :) ).
3) Wait a couple of hours to see if anything breaks.
4) Make a tech blog post and post a notice to the whatwg list (I'll do this). We'll have our front page validating as HTML 5 at this point, hopefully, to make a more positive impact.
5) See what happens!
I expect this will pick up some interest, since we'll probably be increasing the number of HTML 5 page views by a factor of -- oh, ten thousand? (Is there any top *1000* site that uses HTML 5 for all its primary content?) We can see how things develop, and if all goes well start using more HTML 5 features.
I'd recommend that until the code goes live, this should be considered an *experimental* *development* change. People shouldn't go around announcing this everywhere until it's actually live. For one thing, some unknown problem might crop up and we'd have to temporarily roll back, which would cause confusion and bad press for both us and HTML 5. For another thing, it would be nice if we could link to a validating main page in the announcement. I'm sure people can hold off posting stories to Slashdot for a week or two, right? :)
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