Rob Lanphier wrote:
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 5:22 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Are you following the deployment plan outlined by Roan here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27478#c18? (It was a follow-up to Aryeh's post here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-June/053775.html.
That plan may be more conservative than we need to be, given it's been enabled on mediawiki.org for so long. At the time Aryeh wrote that, the feature hadn't been as well tested as it is now. That's not to say that we won't find bugs, but that I don't think there will be as many, that they aren't likely to be severe, and it seems we're in a better position to address them quickly than we were when that was written. I wouldn't mind going that route if a lot of other people feel we should, but it seems likely to me that we might accidentally introduce production glitches in the process of implementing the interim steps, and that there could very well be bugs in the interim states that don't occur in the final stage.
I agree that it's more conservative and likely needlessly so. Aryeh has since clarified that the source of most of the previous breakage ($wgExperimentalHtmlIds) was enabled and then re-disabled by default: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27694#c6. As long as $wgExperimentalHtmlIds stays disabled, the issues with Cite, etc. shouldn't re-appear and $wgHtml5 should be safe to enable.
As I understand it, the "enable HTML5 on Wikimedia wikis" goal has become a bit murky. There's $wgHtml5, but that's distinct from setting the doctype (which is what I think most people consider to be the most relevant part).
Are you sure that $wgHtml5 is distinct from the doctype? It looks like mediawiki.org also has the doctype set, and it looks as though Html.php sets it based on that variable.
Sorry, I was a little unclear here. I was talking about $wgDocType and $wgDTD, as discussed by Roan here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27478#c18.
By default, the DOCTYPE is automatically set to "<!DOCTYPE html>\n" when $wgHtml5 is set to true (from includes/Html.php):
--- if ( $wgHtml5 ) { $ret .= "<!DOCTYPE html>\n";
if ( $wgHtml5Version ) { $attribs['version'] = $wgHtml5Version; } } ---
Roan's plan called for adjusting the DOCTYPE and/or DTD before setting $wgHtml5 to true. This is probably unnecessary to do, as you say. My point was that for most people, the DOCTYPE is the most important/relevant piece and that setting $wgDocType = '<!doctype html>\n' is (or can be, rather) distinct from setting $wgHtml5 = 'true';. Depending on how much new and untested code is reliant on $wgHtml5, setting only the DOCTYPE might be a good interim solution iff issues arise with $wgHtml5, but you want to output an HTML5 DOCTYPE.
It's also unclear whether every issue reported in the comments of bug 27478 were filed as separate bugs. In particular, I'm unsure if Cite was ever properly fixed (or if Aryeh's mentioned alternate, stop-gap solution was implemented). As I recall, the Cite breakage was breaking links in articles.
This is what I'm hoping we can get some clarity on. How many of those comments are still relevant?
FWIW, I'm not in a big rush to enable this; it's just that it seems like we're running out of good reasons not to just do it already.
I believe not enabling $wgHtml5 is holding up other development efforts (based on some of the comments at bug 27478, e.g., comments 15 and 21). I also don't see (m)any good reasons to not just do it already. :-)
MZMcBride