[Wikipedia-l] Is nowiki broken?

[Brion VIBBER]

Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Some days ago, I added a couple of empty links on my user page. They showed, 
> so I enclosed them in <nowiki> so that they would be passed through as HTML 
> and be invisible. I just checked and they are visible. Was something changed?

<Nowiki> no longer passes through arbitrary HTML. Think Javascript... 
Java... ActiveX... (shudder!)

Since HTML is for our purposes a subset of wikicode, it ought not to be 
allowed as ''code'' inside a <nowiki>...</nowiki> block. Hence, the < 
and > characters inside such a block are passed through as the character 
entities &lt; and &gt; so that the ''text'' is not interpreted by your 
browser as HTML ''code''.

Unless, of course, you have a better idea.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)