On 30 Dec 2002 13:55:35 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
(Richard, you may be interested in the wikitech-l development list; see http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l )
On lun, 2002-12-30 at 11:02, Richard Grevers wrote:
My apologies if this has been discussed before, but I just noticed that Wikipedia pages carry a doctype declaration of
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
Since this does not include the URL to a full DTD, the curse of doctype sniffing sees most browsers render the page in "Quirks" or "Bugwards compatible" mode rather than "strict" mode.
Yes, this is intentional.
We don't use the strict DTD (or, better yet, XHTML) because our hacked-together wikicode->HTML parser currently can't guarantee that it will generate well-formed output (particularly if there is raw HTML in the page, which is munged a bit but not always correctly). If well-behaved web browsers reject the page or massively break page rendering due to a minor error, it's going to be mighty difficult for editors using them to click 'edit' and try to work around the problem!
Sorry, a sloppy use of "Strict". I agree that using a strict DTD where the code is 1) machine generated 2) able to be input directly by editors is asking for trouble. But allowing browsers with two rendering modes to render the more standards compliant one by using the transitional DTD with URL ( <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/loose.dtd"> ) would be preferable to quirks mode. At worst, it would cause markup such as <SMALL><Table> to not render as small.
Perhaps it would be a good idea for the preview page to contain a link (targeted to a new window) to submit the page to the validator. (Or to generate the page as it would be if saved and submit that to the validator).
-- Why is it that most nudists are people you don't want to see naked?