[Wikitext-l] Fwd from [Wikitech-l]: Cleaning up deprecated html in WikiText

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Original thread:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-August/054603.html

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation


Forwarded conversation
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Cleaning up deprecated html in WikiText
------------------------

From: *Daniel Friesen* <lists at nadir-seen-fire.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 5:39 AM
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


Right now in wide usage on wiki markup like so is used:
{|
|-
|valign=top width=100%|
|}

The bgcolor, cellpadding, cellspacing, valign, align, width, height,
etc... presentational attributes have all been completely removed from
html5 and pages using these attributes aren't valid.

There's no way we'll expect all the instances of valign and width to
disappear from every wiki on their own. And frankly in the context of
authoring WikiText I don't believe the user should have to care about
that and be forced to write a longer style line.

What are people's opinions on the idea of taking these removed
presentational attributes, and turning them into sugared parts of
WikiText that are output as actual css in the output.

The change would essentially mean that this:
|valign=top width=100%|
Would become:
<td style="vertical-align: top; width: 100%;">
Instead of this:
<td valign="top" width="100%">


I can only find one downside. Text browsers like w3m do make use of
valign but don't support css, hence the change does make the valign
revert to normal vertically centered alignment.
I should make a few notes:
- This doesn't even affect all text browsers. lynx doesn't display
tables in a tabular form and hence doesn't care what type of alignment
attributes you have.
- This has absolutely nothing to do with web accessibility; Screen
readers output to things like audio and braille, and hence don't display
things visually so alignment means nothing to them. And w3 appears to
restrict users with poor eyesight to proper css capable browsers.
Standards for web accessibility for users with poor eyesight seams
focused on things like ensuring usability with screen zooms and larger
fonts, rather than expecting users with bad eyesight to use text browsers.

--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]


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----------
From: *Daniel Kinzler* <daniel at brightbyte.de>
Date: Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 6:13 AM
To: daniel at nadir-seen-fire.com, Wikimedia developers <
wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


This sounds good to me.


I'd like to take this opportunity to once more float the idea of having two
types of "tables" in wikitext:

* "grids" used for layout, that can be nested, and may be rendered as html
tables but would better be rendered using divs with appropriate styles.

* actual data tables, which can not contain block elements in their cells
(and
can not be nested), for actual tabular data.

i think this would make for cleaner wiki text and for cleaner html output.

-- daniel
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