[Wikipedia-l] Notice of proposed change to <pre> markup behavior

[Brion VIBBER]

Taw has pointed out that on the old UseMod wiki software, putting text 
in a <pre> tag disabled interpretation of wiki markup as well as being 
preformatted. On the Polish wikipedia, this was extensively used for 
programming examples, where markup interpretation (links, lists, etc) 
could horribly break the code.

At some point this was changed on the new software, so that to get the 
same effect you have to also put in a <nowiki> tag inside the <pre> tag; 
this means the many code examples are broken until they have yet more 
tags added to them; Taw has requested that the old behavior be restored 
instead.

Compare old:
  http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?SandBox
and current:
  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASandbox

Is there any objection to making this change? Preformatted text with 
wikicode interpretation has always been available by putting a blank 
space at the beginning of each line, making <pre> redundant.

The change might require some pages on the English wiki to be altered to 
remove now-redundant <nowiki> tags.

An additional question: while UseMod's <pre> and <nowiki> tags both 
suppressed HTML tags (ie, <b>bold</b> appeared as raw text), neither 
suppressed character references (ie, &#x109; appeared as 
c-with-circumflex, not as raw text). The current <nowiki> behavior 
suppresses both tags and char references. Which is preferred?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)