[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Proposal: switch to HTML 5

[David Gerard]

Plans for shifting Wikimedia to HTML5, probably starting with en:wp Main Page.

(Simetrical is quite keen on this change, as apart from anything else
it'll cut our served page size *after gzipping* by 5-20%.)

HTML5 is the new HTML standard. It's specifically been written be
backward compatible with most of the horrible quirks in all past
browsers - it's a vendor-driven standard - and now it's the W3C
official future of HTML. So nothing should break for anyone. Note
provisions in below plan in case something does.


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/7/10
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Proposal: switch to HTML 5
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


Apparently something ate my last post here.  (I think it was my
Chromium nightly build.)  Okay, reposting from memory:

After discussion with Brion on IRC, I've provisionally enabled an HTML
5 doctype in r53034:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/53034

My thoughts on what we should do in the immediate future are:

1) Get at least the enwiki Main Page set up so it will validate as
HTML 5 when we scap:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=HTML5&group=0>

1a) Remove border="0" from Wikimedia's $wgCopyrightIcon (it does
nothing anyway).

1b) Rope some enwiki sysops into getting rid of all cellpadding,
cellspacing, align, and clear attributes on the Main Page (converting
them to CSS).

2) Scap (whenever this happens -- maybe not so immediate future :) ).

3) Wait a couple of hours to see if anything breaks.

4) Make a tech blog post and post a notice to the whatwg list (I'll do
this).  We'll have our front page validating as HTML 5 at this point,
hopefully, to make a more positive impact.

5) See what happens!

I expect this will pick up some interest, since we'll probably be
increasing the number of HTML 5 page views by a factor of -- oh, ten
thousand?  (Is there any top *1000* site that uses HTML 5 for all its
primary content?)  We can see how things develop, and if all goes well
start using more HTML 5 features.

I'd recommend that until the code goes live, this should be considered
an *experimental* *development* change.  People shouldn't go around
announcing this everywhere until it's actually live.  For one thing,
some unknown problem might crop up and we'd have to temporarily roll
back, which would cause confusion and bad press for both us and HTML
5.  For another thing, it would be nice if we could link to a
validating main page in the announcement.  I'm sure people can hold
off posting stories to Slashdot for a week or two, right?  :)

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