Brion Vibber wrote:
On Dec 22, 2004, at 1:48 PM, David Friedland wrote:
P.S. I have been running into lots and lots of
font tags that make our
output invalid XHTML but would be valid if they were span tags, but of
course can't be span tags because span tags are forbidden. Can we
PLEASE allow span tags so that we can begin the process of making
Wikipedia pages be valid XHTML?
1) Can you please check in the w3c validator and confirm that they are
invalid?
It's not valid XHTML 1.0-Strict. It's valid XHTML 1.0-Transitional, but
that's not a markup standard that properly separates semantic from
presentational markup.
2) We're not adding new HTML tags, we already have
too many. We hope to
reduce the number in the future but have other things to do.
OK. I'll throw in <hr>, <em>, <strong>, <i>, and <b> in
addition to
<font> for <span>. We don't have _any_ legitimate use for those tags
because we already have wikimarkup for them--feel free to disable them.
We do have legitimate use for <span> though. That's a reduction of 5
useless tags for 1 useful one. What a deal! If you really twist my arm,
we can get rid of <code>, <cite>, and <h1> to <h6>--I haven't
seen any
legitimate uses of them either.
At the very least, there should be some kind of explanation or
justification for why the current tags are allowed and why the disabled
tags aren't allowed. As it stands, it's arbitrary and maddening,
especially considering that people have been asking for normalization of
permitted HTML tags for more than a year and no one who can has been
willing to do _anything_.
Sometimes it seems like only things that the current developers are
interested in get done. And you can't become a developer unless you work
on things that the developers are interested in, because otherwise your
contributions get ignored (see e.g.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224). And if you dare to
criticize them, they just trot out the "we're just volunteers and only
have to work on what we want to work on" argument.
Perhaps a lesson from Spiderman is in order: with great power comes
great responsibility.
- David
P.S. Still can't view IPA in IE using Monobook.