On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Let us please appreciate what is being said here: "Wikipedia is a horrible place to copy templates from". We pride ourselves of being open source and the current templates make us as bad as the worst proprietary vendor. We have what is effectively an API and it is not documented at all. Thanks, GerardM
Actually, I think Daniel had a somewhat different point.
Wikimedia uses Tidy which does a good job at closing dangling format tags. A very substantial fraction of our templates actually have dangling divs, and tables, and other bad syntax that Tidy is covering up for us. Anyone who has ever tried to copy Wikimedia templates into a wiki with Tidy turned off (the default setting) knows that many of our templates will actually return a lot of junk.
Strictly speaking it should be the editors' job to properly close tables and divs, etc., but because Tidy is so good at it they don't have to, which makes our wikicode less portable.
-Robert Rohde