On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Håkon Wium Lie howcome@opera.com wrote:
It's easy enough to rewrite, and the worst-case scenario is a minor stylistic change for some users. In the best case, the markup and the style sheet are changed in sync.
In theory. The problem is organizational: the people who change the software, the people who change the stylesheets on any particular wiki, and the people who sync new versions of the software to the site constitute a few hundred different groups, mostly pairwise disjoint. There are over a thousand Wikimedia wikis last I heard, and to be sure we didn't break anything we'd have to review all of their stylesheets and fix them if necessary.
It would be interesting if we had a procedure for this, however. It should suffice to write a script to grep all the stylesheets on all sites for appropriate rules, and ask a steward or other global sysop to add the replacement rules before the software is synced (in addition to the old ones, so there's no period where neither set works). This is more convenient now than it used to be, since we do have a unified login and global sysops.
Now, why don't we allow <a> in wikimarkup? . . .