Brion Vibber wrote:
On Dec 22, 2004, at 1:48 PM, David Friedland wrote:
P.S. I have been running into lots and lots of font tags that make our output invalid XHTML but would be valid if they were span tags, but of course can't be span tags because span tags are forbidden. Can we PLEASE allow span tags so that we can begin the process of making Wikipedia pages be valid XHTML?
- Can you please check in the w3c validator and confirm that they are
invalid?
It's not valid XHTML 1.0-Strict. It's valid XHTML 1.0-Transitional, but that's not a markup standard that properly separates semantic from presentational markup.
- We're not adding new HTML tags, we already have too many. We hope to
reduce the number in the future but have other things to do.
OK. I'll throw in <hr>, <em>, <strong>, <i>, and <b> in addition to <font> for <span>. We don't have _any_ legitimate use for those tags because we already have wikimarkup for them--feel free to disable them. We do have legitimate use for <span> though. That's a reduction of 5 useless tags for 1 useful one. What a deal! If you really twist my arm, we can get rid of <code>, <cite>, and <h1> to <h6>--I haven't seen any legitimate uses of them either.
At the very least, there should be some kind of explanation or justification for why the current tags are allowed and why the disabled tags aren't allowed. As it stands, it's arbitrary and maddening, especially considering that people have been asking for normalization of permitted HTML tags for more than a year and no one who can has been willing to do _anything_.
Sometimes it seems like only things that the current developers are interested in get done. And you can't become a developer unless you work on things that the developers are interested in, because otherwise your contributions get ignored (see e.g. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224). And if you dare to criticize them, they just trot out the "we're just volunteers and only have to work on what we want to work on" argument.
Perhaps a lesson from Spiderman is in order: with great power comes great responsibility.
- David
P.S. Still can't view IPA in IE using Monobook.