Can't we do both 1 and 4. Remove it for now, fix the transform, and then re-enable the transform and disable the align attribute?

Agreed, let's do #1. It sounds like this isn't our only HTML5 validity problem. We shouldn't punish our readers with poorly-formatted content in the name of technical correctness. Rob

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Derric Atzrott < datzrott(a)alizeepathology.com&gt; wrote: I'll try. Before HTML4, the "align" attribute (other than for 'table') with the value "center" meant "Center all of my content". Since the attribute has been removed from the spec, you need to replace it with CSS rules. Unfortunately however there are no CSS rules that are able to exactly reproduce the behavior of the attribute. You have "text-align:center;" but this only applies to content that is inline. It does not center a div inside a table cell for instance, where align="center" would have done this. To get this behavior, you need to apply "margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" on the div. So the pseudo CSS rules would be something like: table[align=center] { text-align: center; } table[align=center] > *[display=block or table]{ margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } The problem is that as far as I know, that last one is not possible with CSS. You cannot say: "apply this style to all direct children that are in block mode". If you look at the internals of mozilla and webkit, then you will note they have the same problem (they also transform the align attribute). Therefore they have the following browser specific text-align attributes: -webkit-right, -moz-right, -webkit-center etc... which bypass the default behavior of text-align to apply to just inline elements to include block elements as well. How other browser vendors do this, I'm not sure of. DJ

On Sep 19, 2012, at 6:23 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman &lt;d.j.hartman+wmf_ml(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I agree with others, #1 seems to be the best choice. The W3C validator is not a visitor nor a user of the software. It's a useful tool to find problems, but as long as browsers are not standards compliant, and the W3C validator stays ignorant of that fact, we have very good reason to choose to optimize for real browsers, and not the hypothetical browser in the eyes of the validator. The HTML output of the MediaWiki software is meant for users. Users that have browsers in front of them. All relevant browsers support "align", regardless of whether the page is in HTML5 made. Having said that, word shall be spread to users to stop using "align" and make layouts in CSS instead (through classes), which by design will make use of "align" impossible and require usage of text-align and margin instead. Even if we could transform it correctly, I would oppose automatic transformation (be it from output-only in the parser, or by a bot changing the actual wikitext). Because the "align" attribute is a means to an end that has lots of implications and possible unintended side-effects. Contrary to text-align and margin, which are very specific and targeted at their purpose. By replacing a single align attribute with all kinds of inline styles the original intention of that align attribute will be lost at the cost of a lot of bloat in the output that we don't really need anyway. -- Krinkle _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Scanning dumps (or really dealing with them in any form) is pretty awful. There's been some brainstorming in the past for how to set up a system where users (or operators) could run arbitrary regular expressions on all of the current wikitext regularly, but such a setup requires _a lot_ of anything involved (disk space, RAM, bandwidth, processing power, etc.). Maybe one day Labs will have something like this.