Subramanya Sastry wrote:
Some user pages seem to exploit this as a feature even (unclosed div tags).
Not just some and not just seem. :-) Thank you for this detailed e-mail.
John Mark Vandenberg wrote:
The main reason for a spec should be the sanity of the Wikimedia technical user base, including WMF engineers paid by donors, who build parsers in other languages for various reasons, including supporting tools that account for a very large percent of the total edits to Wikimedia and are critical in preventing abuse and assisting admins performing critical tasks to keep the sites from falling apart.
In fairness, there's a Parsing team at the Wikimedia Foundation. We all recognize that there's a problem and I think we're making decent progress toward better defined, though not necessarily saner, behavior.
MZMcBride