To solve validness I'd suggest creating styles for this in MediaWiki:Common.css and on a regular basis running reports to surface which articles use the text-align property. It would be great to have a dedicated wiki page linking to these articles and asking editors to fix them. It would give people who care about Wikipedia an easy way to contribute.
I have a similar problem in mobile - at some point I'd like us to deprecate use of the style attribute in wikitext in favour of using stylesheets and the class attribute which is much more manageable and would be interested in whatever solution you come to here.
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Krinkle krinklemail@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 19, 2012, at 6:23 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com wrote:
I would like to open some discussion about https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40329 This bug is about the fact that we currently do a 'partial' transform of the HTML5-invalid attribute 'align'.
We all agree that this is bad, what we need to figure out is what to do next:
1: Disable the transform and output the align attribute even though it's not valid HTML5. Solve validness later. 2: Remove the attribute from HTML5 and 'break' the content. Fix by users (or bot). 3: Disable HTML5, correct the content of the wiki's (possibly with a bot) and remove the attribute in HTML5 mode, reenable HTML5. 4: Fix the transform (not that easy)
My personal preference is with 1, since this is causing trouble now and with 1 we solve immediate problems, we just add to the lack of valid HTML5 output that we already have. In my opinion 2 would be too disruptive and 3 would take too long.
Danny is of the opinion that we should never transform at the parser side and that we should fix the content instead (2 or 3).
So, how best to fix the issue/what should be our strategy with regard to content that is not HTML 5 valid in general ?
<Discuss>
I agree with others, #1 seems to be the best choice.
The W3C validator is not a visitor nor a user of the software. It's a useful tool to find problems, but as long as browsers are not standards compliant, and the W3C validator stays ignorant of that fact, we have very good reason to choose to optimize for real browsers, and not the hypothetical browser in the eyes of the validator.
The HTML output of the MediaWiki software is meant for users. Users that have browsers in front of them.
All relevant browsers support "align", regardless of whether the page is in HTML5 made.
Having said that, word shall be spread to users to stop using "align" and make layouts in CSS instead (through classes), which by design will make use of "align" impossible and require usage of text-align and margin instead.
Even if we could transform it correctly, I would oppose automatic transformation (be it from output-only in the parser, or by a bot changing the actual wikitext). Because the "align" attribute is a means to an end that has lots of implications and possible unintended side-effects. Contrary to text-align and margin, which are very specific and targeted at their purpose. By replacing a single align attribute with all kinds of inline styles the original intention of that align attribute will be lost at the cost of a lot of bloat in the output that we don't really need anyway.
-- Krinkle
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