Aryeh Gregor wrote:
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.
We have done other big changes in the past. Almost all creations/renamings of mediawiki messages need local community action!
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? . . .
What's the problem with it? Just not being able to add class/style attributes? There's some code adding parameters to the wikilinks, but I find them ugly. I'd prefer compressing spans surrounding anchor elements into the a. Ie. <span foo="bar">[[baz]]</span> to produce <a href="baz" foo="bar">baz</a>