The idea of <sig> seems fine to me as a way to semantically designate signatures, however I'd like to caution against using a <span> in the expanded text, as while it may not be an issue with WMF wikis, some third-party wikis format signatures like you would in a forum (in that there is a signature "block" underneath the post, alas I cannot find that wiki again so no example), and these signatures can contain block-level elements. Rendering to a <span> may break that style of discussion, perhaps we can instead render to a <div> and set display: inline for it in the default css. Then a wiki could override this to move it wherever or display it as a block if they so choose.
Another alternative is keep the span, but add a hook to allow extensions to fully modify the output (including changing the span to something else), that way we can keep the sig semantically valid for the 99.99% of them that are actually used inline.
Also, +1 from me on *not* automatically changing old sigs as they get updated, as we could lose valuable temporal information that way (such as the aforementioned "I'm being paid to edit" disclosure). Wrapping existing signatures in <sig> seems fine if someone wants to code that system, but that's the extent I would personally go with modifying existing signatures.
Regards, Ryan Schmidt
On Oct 1, 2014, at 7:42 AM, Derric Atzrott datzrott@alizeepathology.com wrote:
From the standpoint of programmatically detecting a signature, the above could be cleaned up and work well enough.
Would this mean that if people had a fancy sig, and they changed it, it would automatically update everywhere with this magic tag instead of just applying to new signatures? (Which might be cool)
Downside to that you might have some tricky issue where people change their sig after the fact to be something malicious (For some definition of malicious), and then all the old sigs change without an edit to track it and generally be a vehicle for mass vandalism. (Didn't that use to be an issue on /. ?)
I haven't looked at the actual patch yet, but based on the discussion it seems like this code would allow us to update pages if people's signatures changed? I too am not sure this is a good idea.
I do though support the idea of wrapping signatures in a <sig> markup to make it easier to programatically detect them. That <sig> markup could be rendered as a span with a class="sig" as well which allow those who are just scraping the HTML of the page to be able to detect them as well.
This also makes working out what the state of the page at time X quite hard for things like "Please note that I am being paid to edit by XYZ Inc." that come and go from month to month to be seen.
This is one of my biggest concerns as well.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
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