We've replaced Tidy, a tool that fixes HTML errors, with a HTML5-based tool. Given a HTML5 library, replacing Tidy is pretty straightforward, but it took us
three years to finally flip the switch. In this blog post, we'll explore how the time was spent which also throws light on the complexities of making changes
to certain pieces of the technical infrastructure powering Wikimedia wikis.
This switch was a collaborative effort between the Parsing, Platform, Community Liaison teams and other individuals (from the Product side) at the Wikimedia
Foundation and volunteer editing communities on various wikis. Everyone involved played important and specific roles in getting us to this important milestone.
In this post, the authors use "we" as a narrative convenience to refer to some subgroup of people above.
First: Some background
What is Tidy?
Tidy is a library that fixes HTML markup errors, among other things. It was developed in the 1990s when HTML4 was the standard and different browsers did not deal
with ill-formed HTML markup identically leading to cross-browser rendering differences.
Badly formed markup is common on wiki pages when editors use HTML tags in templates and on the page itself. (Example: unclosed HTML tags, such as a without a ,
are common). In some cases, MediaWiki itself introduces HTML errors. In order to deal with this, Tidy was introduced into MediaWiki around 2004 to ensure the output of MediaWiki
was well-formed HTML and to ensure it renders identically across different browsers... (CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ MORE)
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