On 08/01/2016 11:37 AM, Marc-Andre wrote:
... Is there something we can do to make the passage of years hurt less? Should we be laying groundwork now to prevent issues decades away?
One possibility is considering storing rendered HTML for old revisions. It lets wikitext (and hence parser) evolve without breaking old revisions. Plus rendered HTML will use the template revision at the time it was rendered vs. the latest revision (this is the problem Memento tries to solve).
HTML storage comes with its own can of worms, but it seems like a solution worth thinking about in some form.
1. storage costs (fully rendered HTML would be 5-10 times bigger than wikitext for that same page, and much larger if stored as wikitext diffs) 2. evolution of HTML spec and its affect on old content (this affects the entire web, so, whatever solution works there will work for us as well) 3. newly discovered security holes and retroactively fixing them in stored html and released dumps (not sure). ... and maybe others.
Subbu.