In case no one has mentioned this, changing the DOCTYPE has a pretty huge effect on how CSS gets rendered. Wikimedia's current DOCTYPE (XHTML transitional) maps to "almost standards mode" or "limited quirks mode" in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE8 and IE9. Changing to "<!DOCTYPE html>" will switch the rendering mode in all of those browsers to "standards mode". Testing and tweaking all the CSS in Mediawiki for this DOCTYPE change is a huge task. I'm already getting bug reports due to this issue, and I wasn't even aware we were making the change.
The switch to <!DOCTYPE html> should be reverted immediately. If we want to switch to this DOCTYPE, we need to plan and budget for the front-end development that will be necessary to support this change.
How exactly was the conclusion reached that this change would only affect screen-scraping tools? The MediaWiki page on the HTML5 transition lists several other issues, none of which seem to have been adequately discussed or addressed.
Ryan Kaldari
On 3/22/11 9:35 AM, Chad wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Max Semenikmaxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
As the matter of fact, MediaWiki serves HTML5 by default. The only reason why it is still not enabled on Wikipedia is backward compatibility with numerous screen-scraping scripts/tools. However, they had their last warning recently - HTML5 was briefly enabled a couple of times and there's no guarantee that next time it will not stick :D
Was a date given for that? I might've missed it.
-Chad
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