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

[Peter Coombe]

2009/7/10 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>

> 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<Simetrical%2Bwikilist 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?  :)
>
If we can do it, this sounds like a great idea. Forgive my ignorance though,
but what does "scap" mean?

Pete / the wub