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List:       wikien-l
Subject:    [WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week
From:       Brion Vibber <brion () pobox ! com>
Date:       2006-06-06 21:48:26
Message-ID: 4485F82A.2020201 () pobox ! com
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Just a heads-up, folks:

Later this week I'm going to be installing a fix for some longstanding bu=
gs with
HTML in wiki pages. One of the issues is a difference in rendering of tem=
plates
that improperly nest HTML tags, which caused certain badly-written templa=
tes to
render in one way on Wikipedia but wildly broken on most other wikis.

(Don't forget that an important part of what Wikipedia & its sister proje=
cts are
about is making information sharable and reusable. If the code breaks whe=
n
copied to another site, that's Bad.)

Once the fix is in, templates should render about the same on Wikipedia a=
nd
other wikis where the "HTML Tidy" plugin isn't being used. The bad news i=
s that
some of these templates will be broken; so it would be great if we can ma=
ke sure
they get cleaned up.

Problem templates are mostly those which start an HTML tag in one templat=
e, then
finish it in another. For instance if {{table-header}} contains a <table>=
, and
then the table rows and final </table> are in another template entirely. =
These
have always broken on regular MediaWiki -- the template is required to cl=
ose its
own tags -- though they sometimes appeared to work on Wikipedia due to bu=
gs with
our HTML handling when Tidy is enabled.

I've done some automated checks on templates on en.wikipedia.org to make =
a list
of likely problem candidates:

http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-start.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-end.txt
http://leuksman.com/misc/templates/html-table-row.txt


If you've got a template that you're not sure if it will work, try copyin=
g it to
my test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/ . This has the fix installed wi=
th the
corrected behavior, so you can see about how it will render on Wikipedia =
next week.


Please make sure this information is disseminated to the various other la=
nguage
and project wikis people are working on; I don't want to hear "waah! all =
my
templates broke and no one told me!" next week. :)

For the moment the same kind of construct with wiki tables ({| ... |}) wi=
ll
still work, but note that some time in the future we're going to have to =
look at
'fixing' that too. (This might require some enhancements to how templates=
 work
to make it easier to fill in long tables.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


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