2014-10-01 17:17 GMT+02:00 Ryan Schmidt skizzerz@gmail.com:
The idea of <sig> seems fine to me as a way to semantically designate signatures, however I'd like to caution against using a <span> in the expanded text, as while it may not be an issue with WMF wikis, some third-party wikis format signatures like you would in a forum (in that there is a signature "block" underneath the post, alas I cannot find that wiki again so no example), and these signatures can contain block-level elements. Rendering to a <span> may break that style of discussion, perhaps we can instead render to a <div> and set display: inline for it in the default css. Then a wiki could override this to move it wherever or display it as a block if they so choose.
Using a <div> inside list markup (and we inexplicably use list markup for discussions) will probably cause HTML Tidy to throw up all over the output, a <span> is probably the only option. As you can see by the list of blockers to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2542 , Tidy will horribly break most of interesting kinds of markup.
(Not that I think trying to mark up sigs is a very good idea in general, for the reasons Brion mentioned.)