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