On Dec 21, 2004, at 6:20 AM, Muke Tever wrote: Arbitrary HTML and JavaScript in the MediaWiki: messages is dangerous, and is something that's being phased out. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is security: on our larger sites we have literally *hundreds* of sysops with permissions to edit these messages. With those numbers, it's hard to assign sufficient 'trust'; even if we believe every one of them to be upstanding, well-meaning individuals the likelihood of a compromised account increases with every new sysop. If a broken-into (or malicious) sysop account can be used to add arbitrary HTML or JavaScript code, it could be used to exploit security vulnerabilities in web browsers or more simply attack and subvert the wiki accounts of other users. Such an attack might be found and reverted immediately, or it might attack dozens or hundreds -- or thousands -- of visitors before being stopped. The second is robustness: accidentally or maliciously placed invalid HTML could break the site. As the web moves towards more XML (which is very strict about proper markup syntax) it can become difficult to recover from such a breakage without manual intervention. There's still a lot of places with raw HTML in messages, so it's an ongoing process. Text fragments are being moved to either plaintext or wikitext, depending on their use and purpose. (Paragraph-level blocks such as the copyright warning are generally wikitext.) It would probably be worthwhile to write up the special character inserter as a MediaWiki extension -- then it could be inserted into the wikitext message in a safe, secure way. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Dec 21, 2004, at 6:20 AM, Muke Tever wrote: Arbitrary HTML and JavaScript in the MediaWiki: messages is dangerous, and is something that's being phased out. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is security: on our larger sites we have literally *hundreds* of sysops with permissions to edit these messages. With those numbers, it's hard to assign sufficient 'trust'; even if we believe every one of them to be upstanding, well-meaning individuals the likelihood of a compromised account increases with every new sysop. If a broken-into (or malicious) sysop account can be used to add arbitrary HTML or JavaScript code, it could be used to exploit security vulnerabilities in web browsers or more simply attack and subvert the wiki accounts of other users. Such an attack might be found and reverted immediately, or it might attack dozens or hundreds -- or thousands -- of visitors before being stopped. The second is robustness: accidentally or maliciously placed invalid HTML could break the site. As the web moves towards more XML (which is very strict about proper markup syntax) it can become difficult to recover from such a breakage without manual intervention. There's still a lot of places with raw HTML in messages, so it's an ongoing process. Text fragments are being moved to either plaintext or wikitext, depending on their use and purpose. (Paragraph-level blocks such as the copyright warning are generally wikitext.) It would probably be worthwhile to write up the special character inserter as a MediaWiki extension -- then it could be inserted into the wikitext message in a safe, secure way. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Dec 22, 2004, at 5:10 PM, Jo wrote: Sorry, the mailing list automatically discards most attachments. (We've had problems in the past with viruses mailing themselves to the lists with a fake return address from list members.) Open an enhancement request at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ and attach it there.

I've created a <charinsert> extension which produces the little javascript inserter bits for the characters you feed it. This can be used in wikitext, such as the 'copyrightwarning' messages which was previously HTML.

I've created a <charinsert> extension which produces the little javascript inserter bits for the characters you feed it. This can be used in wikitext, such as the 'copyrightwarning' messages which was previously HTML.