Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-10-14/Technology report

I'm looking forward to the 2017 Wikimarkup editor. Hopefully switching between it and VisualEditor will be clear. It'll make it easier to teach newcomers. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 10:35, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

The New Wikitext Editor has a problem. Preview is broken-by-design. The current wikitext editor gives accurate previews because it uses the exact same render-engine that is used when viewing an article. The new editor uses Visual Editor's engine to display the preview. This is a design error. It means that there are a large number of random problems. Red links, black links, and external links all incorrectly render as plain blue links. It has some issues with refs, it can split one line into multiple lines, it can display lines in the wrong order, it can dump raw wikicode onto the page, and many assorted other issues. I'm asking the WMF if they will fix this.... asking if they will switch the normal article render-engine instead of the Visual Editor render engine for previews. I haven't been able to get an answer on this yet. I think we should NOT deploy a new wikitext with broken previews when the current wikitext editor gives perfect previews. Alsee (talk) 13:21, 16 October 2016 (UTC)


 * In the current W3 markup notes for a void element (in this case &lt;br&gt;), the backslash character "/" before the closing "&gt;" character remains optional. (It's also true at HTML 5.) There's no reason for Wikipedia to enforce that behavior via a bot. Praemonitus (talk) 22:09, 24 October 2016 (UTC)