On 08/19/2015 08:22 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
And, as several others have noted, you can't just disable Tidy, since the effects of unclosed tags are not confined to the content area, and there is a large amount of existing content that depends on it. I have seen the effects of Tidy being accidentally disabled on the English Wikipedia, it is not pleasant.
Am I correct in saying that MZMcBride is the only person in this thread in favour of the idea of getting rid of HTML cleanup?
I think it depends what you mean by "HTML cleanup." Are you referring only to "fixing" mismatched HTML elements or are you also referring to reimplementing all of the other behavior that Tidy brings in?
Bartosz wrote:
We really do need this feature. Not anything else that Tidy does, most of its behavior is actually damaging, but we need to match the open and close tags to prevent the interface from getting jumbled.
My reading of this thread is that this is the consensus view. The problem, as I see it, is that Tidy has been deployed long enough that some users are also relying on all of its other bad behaviors. It seems to me that a replacement for Tidy either has to reimplement all of its unwanted behaviors to avoid breakage with current wikitext or it has to break an unknown amount of current wikitext.
In response to both these queries, see this snippet from my earlier post on this thread ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-August/082806.html )
"Even replacing it with a HTML5 parser (as per the current plan) is not entirely straightforward simply because of all the other unrelated-to-html5-semantics behavior. Part of the task of replacing Tidy is to figure out all the ways those pages might break and the best way to handle that breakage."
Also see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89331#1499979 about how we might go about evaluating this.
So, we aren't saying we'll implement those Tidy behaviors here. Part of the solution might very well be to break some of that Tidy behavior and have the pages be fixed up (bots, manually, however). In any case, the first step is to understand those impacts.
Subbu.