Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-07-02/Technology report

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The cite bug is one thing, but surely tools that screen-scrape get what they deserve. How many years have people been told to use the API? - David Gerard (talk) 11:27, 3 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • What is the alternative for font and center? (Better solve it now, that waiting till it gets messy) Night of the Big Wind talk 12:59, 3 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;">foo</span> thus: foo. The word serif tells the browser what type of font to use if it does not have one matching the exact name of the other font(s) preceding it. Similarly, <div style="text-align:center;">bar</div>. Use <span>...</span> to affect only part of the text within a block (such as a signature), and <div>...</div> to affect the text or layout for an entire block (such as a paragraph or table cell). — Richardguk (talk) 13:42, 3 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    Hmmm, back to the basics, but I have fixed it. Interesting was that my similar looking signature on ENWP did fit, but that the one on NLWP (Dutch Wikipedia) was to long and cut off. Night of the Big Wind talk 14:40, 3 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    As much as I would love to see <font> die in a hole, surely browsers are still going to support it, and it will just cause validation errors. Bawolff (talk) 13:33, 4 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    If necessary, a bot could go through Wikipedia's old article text, and convert instances of <font> to the appropriate inline styles. <font> could then eventually be taken off the HTML tag whitelist. Alternatively, we could keep <font>, but only as a wikitext pseudo-HTML idiom that would be converted into the appropriate styled <span> markup by the wiki software at wikitext rendering time. However, apart from decorating user signatures, I'm not sure that there are any actual encyclopedic uses for <font>: can anyone think of any? -- The Anome (talk) 12:44, 5 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    Potentially, an article discussing <font> itself. Powers T 17:54, 9 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Citation?[edit]

Users should note that certain, long-deprecated markup will cease to function, most notably <font> and <center> tags, which are common in user signatures and on user pages, despite not being officially supported by MediaWiki itself.

What's the citation for this? Is there a reason HTMLTidy couldn't fix this (as it does all kinds of bad HTML from user input)? Has someone (a reliable source) said these tags are going to stop working somewhere? --MZMcBride (talk) 06:05, 11 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, you got me, I was probably exaggerating slightly. Here's how it stands:
  • Those tags are not just deprecated under HTML5 but literally don't exist in the doctype
  • Thus, to my mind, there's a reasonable chance that browsers in strict mode won't render them.
  • However, as you say, Tidy could probably resolve this by fudging them into spans (as The Anome suggests above). Or we could rely on browsers to continue supporting them even in strict mode. Or drop down to quirks mode. But none of them really look like nice options to me.
Hope that helps explain, - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 16:14, 11 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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