PR Stanley wrote:
One of you chaps once told me that XHTML elements had no place in the Wikibook: the rationale being that everyone, regardless of his knowledge of mark-up languages, should be encouraged to contribute to the wiki text. I'm wondering if a small amount of HTML tagging may not be such a bad idea considering the accessibility benefits. What does the list think?
Hello Paul, Wikibook pages can be viewed in several modes. For instance, the URL http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Recursion shows the page in the standard viewing mode as proper HTML. But the URL http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Haskell/Recursion&action=edit shows the page content in editing mode, the source code for the viewing mode so to speak. This source code is written in the wiki mark-up language which is aimed to be "simple" and is very different from HTML. Thus, in principle the wiki mark-up wouldn't understand HTML. That being said, the language fortunately recognizes a small number of HTML tags, including <i>,<b>,<h1>,<p>,<span>,<code> and others, see also http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Help:HTML_in_wikitext Note that the most HTML tags duplicate existing mark-up functionality. For example, one can now either use ''this text is italic'' or <i>this text is italic</i> to get an italic font. One tag that is not HTML but nevertheless recognized is <math> which encloses LaTeX formatted formulas. Personally, I don't like the wiki-style mark-up language too much, but as the Haskell Wikibook is only a small user of the infrastructure provided by the general Wikibooks project, we don't have much influence on the markup language. I think that the official Wikibooks project guideline is to favor wiki-style mark-up, but I don't mind if you use the supported HTML tags for the page source code. It's not always easy to properly nest them with the already existing wiki-style mark-up, though, and can result in garbled output in the viewing mode. In particular, I'd suggest to avoid the paragraph tags <p> if possible, separating paragraphs by a single blank line is enough and gets translated into appropriate <p> tags in the viewing mode. In any case, just edit as you see fits. At worst, we'll re-format the mark-up if the viewing output becomes garbled. Regards apfelmus