[Mediawiki-l] XHTML generation

Brion Vibber brion at pobox.com
Fri Feb 18 03:44:42 UTC 2005


Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Thursday 17 February 2005 12:00 pm, Frank Wales wrote:
>>Exactly.  For patients who care more than their browsers do about
>>irrelevant inconsistencies in XHTML, I suggest a course of HTML Tidy:
>>  http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
>
>
> Forgive me if I misread this thread, but given that MediaWiki *is* XHTML
> 1.0 Transitional out of the box, what benefit does it bring us to make
> it no longer XHTML compliant?  And what can tidy do that
> validator.w3.org can't do?

validator.w3.org is a web service where you submit pages and it spits
out error messages telling you what's wrong with it if it doesn't
validate according to the advertised version of (X)HTML.

HTML Tidy is a program where you hand it some chunk of (X)HTML that may
or may not validate properly and it tries to fix it up for you to
produce output that will validate if the original contained errors. (It
can do other junk too like pretty indentation of nested markup.)

MediaWiki can optionally shell out to tidy as a postprocessing step
after wikitext->XHTML conversion, as currently we do not guarantee that
output will validate. (We make some effort to make sure output is
well-formed, but there are probably still failures in well-formedness
too. Validation is much harder, as there are nesting rules and
limitations on what attribute values are valid.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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