Templates complicate the "is this valid" test. Multiple templates can contain invalid syntax which when used together form proper syntax.
Consider a template that starts off a table - say Template:TableStart which contains:
{| |- |
And a Templat:TableStop which contains
|}
The former contains invalid syntax since the table is not closed, the latter contains meaningless characters since the table wasn't started. But used together, the two form a table. For example:
{{TableStart}} Some text |- Perhaps another row {{TableStop}}
That example also contains individually meaningless markup characters (the |-), but after transclusion would render a complete table.
So where do you place the validation logic? If you validate the Template pages themselves, they'll fail - so do you omit Templates from conformance? If so, what about transcluding pages from other Namespaces?
I'm not trying to say that a validator is a bad thing, or that it wouldn't be useful. I'm just wondering how all the false positives can be accounted for.
-- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw)
On Nov 13, 2007 12:01 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Breakages wouldn't ever be silent - they'd produce error messages - either inline ones, ones that prevent the actual saving of the page, or fatal ones.
Says who? What people are saying is that they don't want any error messages and want the parser to accept anything that's thrown at it and just do the best it can.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l