Hello,
I've been trying to arrange a more structured presentation for documenting binary file/data structure bit by bit.
What I have in mind is to make sections appear like html fieldsets, eg. <fieldset><legend>[newline]==section A==[newline]</legend>[nested wikitext here, possibly more fieldsets]</fieldset> ... so what you get is a clean encapsulation model for structure.
I tried a lot of stuff. And eventually have reached the point where tonight I implemented the fieldset/legend tags as http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Tag_extensions.
This gave me more control / made possible the repair of the malformed <p> tags introduced by MediaWiki ( http://en.swordofmoonlight.org/wiki/MDL_(file_format) )
The only problem is the sections, though the edit button stuff is clearly present, have disappeared. Presumably because the parser now ignores anything in the custom tags at whatever point those are generated.
The mediawiki page mentions that for whatever reason baked in (stuff pre-generated I guess when the page is edited) is skipped because it's inside a custom tag. If so, I don't see the logic in that one bit, other than it being an oversight or the tag extension concept is not embraced by developers.
Otherwise I'm at a loss. And anyway, would like any suggestions in terms of restoring this functionality at this point by hook or crook.
PS: For developers reading. The Sanitizer.php file whitelists just about every block level html element you can imagine, but fieldset and legend are not in there. I believe these elements are slightly thought of as related to forms, but they are also really great for encapsulated information which does not qualify as a table proper.
I originally whitelisted fieldset/legend however p tags generated by mediawiki would just not play nice. I assume the p tags don't get in the way of div/table tags for example. I could not find any means of further entrenching the tags in the system and could not find support one via the mediawiki help desk.
Ultimately however, I would like to suggest that some wikitext syntax be staked out for generating fieldset/legend fields. They could be simple extension of the table wikitext. And would facilitate a wider range of flexibility. And might even prove useful over at wikipedia and other major wiki sites. However you never know what ways people will come up with for using wikii, and there are all kinds of different documentation domains with different requirements.
Finally thanks for your time/reading,
UPDATE since joining the mailing list proper. I may try going back to the Sanitizer.php approach if there is a way to prevent the parser from generating illegal html. I found some of my problems tonight were more caused by Firefox being buggy around fieldset/legend. Perhaps it's too soon for these tags. Even though MediaWiki deploys them on some pages like Recent Changes.