Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Now, how about
figuring out how to get manually-specified id's like
<span id="foo"> to be unique? :)
The big problem there is that there's no sensible way to disambiguate
them. Probably the best we can do would be to silently drop any
duplicates. Or maybe replace them with a really in-your-face
"disambiguation" like OMG-DUPLICATE-ID-whatever-FIX-IT-YOU-IDIOT-1. :)
Anyway, this kind of sounds like something Tidy ought to be doing.
Doesn't it?
May this be time to propose again a 'validation' mode / debug output?
Somewhere to place that kind of warnings:
*Skipping duplicate id 'foo'
*Adding </div> for you
*Inexistant attribute foo for span removed
*Too many templates added. Stopping template expansion
etc.
It could be added to the html comment with preprocessor data, or perhaps
as a new box in preview mode.
In no way it is expected to appear in the page viewing, nor I am saying
that we should [[Execution by burning|burn]] (yet) people not writing
100% conformant wiki-text. Also, could be collapsed by default to not
discourage new comers. The point is that getting a better insight on how
mediawiki is "helping" would be most valuable when studying why a
[[Template:Esoteric|esoterism]] isn't working.