Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
O.k., well, I'm in over my head a bit. My feeling is that we should be generating a very low level of HTML, so that all browsers can be sure to render it. So why do we want to force 4.0?
I agree. As long as there are no 4.0 features in the generated HTML, there's no need to specify it.
OTOH, I know of no old browser which would reject displaying a page just because it specifies a DTD that is new.
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
My guess is that no, we don't want people writing HTML markup. We want to support a few tags, as we do now, because they're so commonly known and useful.
Above all, we don't want people to _have_ to do anything even the _least bit_ hard.
Agreed again. I even thought about rewikifying commonly-known elements like B back to '''. Otherwise the following situation is possible:
Author 1 knows a bit HTML, but less Wiki. She writes "<b>term</b>". Author 2 knows no HTML, but is fluent in Wiki. He is confused by "<b>". Also note that while Wiki is fully documented on our site, HTML is not.
For the time being rewikifying can be done by people, but the software could do it as well.
The problem is not big, though, the only thing where Wikipedians commonly use HTML is tables -- many think HTML tables are superior to the Wiki tables. That complaint could be fixed of course in Magnus's script.