On Tuesday 31 July 2007 12:55:32 Rob Church wrote:
Well, no, <a> is not a whitelisted HTML tag, so the MediaWiki sanitiser won't let it through.
It was an example in order to demonstrate the strength of Wiki syntax compared to HTML for hand written texts. HTML/XML an friends aren't exactly concise (and their long winded sntax is probably one reason for the real-life-html parse problems of browsers).
There's no "correct" case - <br> is fine in wiki text; it's sanitised to <br /> before being emitted in HTML, and of course, Tidy usually sorts out any other mess.
Well I guess you have strict coding style guidelines for your source code. Wiki code is source code, too. It should be as clean and simple as possible in order to allow every person editing and improving an article in no time.
As well there is a hell of code pedants out there in Wikipedia that love to correct these HTML bits in Wikipedia (ever ecuntered such a bot or person; I do encounter them very frequent on my watchlist).
Furthermore there are other parsers beside MediaWiki that need to parse MediaWiki wiki source code. For example parsers for printed books, for the Wikipedia DVD and others. A MediaWiki sanitizer doesn't make their life easier...
Semantically speaking, <br style="clear: both;" /> is not a page break; it's just a line break which happens to clear all preceding floats.
Well wiki has no pages you can turn. So this is the nearest matching equivalent to page/chapter break for the web world.
As well I am quite sure that Wikisource could make a great use of a wiki element that allows for that, cause wikisource is source textbook page aligned and sometimes more than one book page on one wiki page and you definitely don't wan't free flow of elements between these two distinct text book pages.
So there's a multitude of valid use cases for a convenient br wiki element.
Wiki syntax is all about shortness and simplicity.
Arnomane