I completely support the general idea of conformance to modern web standards. Nevertheless, I'm wondering whether there are any other benefits to changing <center> to <div style="text-align: center"> other than just modernity and cleaner semantics. Can it improve performance, rendering, forward compatibility, stability? Anything else?
Help talk:Lint errors/obsolete-tag
From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/center
This feature has been removed from the Web standards. Though some browsers may still support it, it is in the process of being dropped. Avoid using it and update existing code if possible
It may take a long time for browsers to drop the center element, but users should be educated to not use it anymore, so nobody has to hurry to replace it when it comes the day when browsers start dropping it.
This makes sense to me, but still, I'd like to have the strongest explanations I can bring to other editors, who will likely be unhappy to see thousands of edits that don't change anything substantial. Again, I understand how it is substantial, but if possible, I'd love to have more convincing arguments.
obsolete tag is a low-priority one. But... everything in linter will cause edits that don't change anything substantial (because the page should look the same after and before the changes)... until the current MediaWiki markup start to behave differently, which is the goal of fixing those errors, and that would make them a substantial change :)
<center> is something that a bot can change easily, users may replace them while they do other edits to the same page. Anyway, I don't think <center> would be in use in many pages (maybe I'm wrong)
MediaWiki is moving towards full HTML5 compliance to clean up some of the oddness in our parsing (mostly related to the effects of tidy). Part of this means adding support for the new HTML5 tags and slowly deprecating and dropping support for the removed ones.
As for why the HTML5 standard dropped <center>, there's some good explanations in this SO answer, but the tl;dr is that HTML is supposed to describe the contents of the text, not format it (that's CSS). And center did just formatting and didn't describe it.
As Ciencia Al Poder said, this is a low priority issue and can easily be done by a bot. The English Wikipedia is slowly migrating towards w:Template:Center for example.
Yeah, that SO answer was perfectly valid... that this is something we should just ignore.
- "It describes presentation, not semantics!" No. It describes a logical arrangement - and yes, it has a default appearance, just as other tags like
<p>or<ul>do. But the point is the enclosed part's relation to its surroundings. Center says "this is something we separate by visually different positioning".
- "It's not valid" Yes it is. It's just deprecated, as in, could be removed later. For 15+ years now. And it's not going anywhere, apparently. There are major sites (including google.com) that use this tag because it's very readable and to the point - and those are the same reasons we like HTML5 tags for.
- "It's not supported in HTML5" It's one of the most widely supported tags, actually. MDN says "its use is discouraged since it could be removed at any time" - good point, but that day may never come, to quote a classic. Center was already deprecated in like 2004 or so - it's still here and still useful.
Completely agree. This is a waste of people's time and there should be a category below "low" to point out that this is something bots might eventually get around to fixing but in the meantime isn't something to bother with at all.
<source></source> and <samp></samp> should probably also be mentioned, and possibly also <pre></pre>. I would make the change but translatable pages make me sad. :D
In the parent page of this discussion ie. Extension:Linter/obsolete-tag, I would suggest editor(s) to please change the tag font to div in the tables present in sections font sizes and helpful hints. Otherwise I think the page needs to be transcluded(not sure about correct word) from the page Special pages ->Lint Errors ->Obsolete html tags(for verification, please visit this link).
I am facing an error in both English wikipedia as well as Simple English Wikipedia. I have edited pages from both multi colon escape errors and obsolete html tag errors in both the wikipedias. But those pages ie. the page Special:Lint Errors is not at all getting updated. I could see my edit in the page history but the page is not getting removed from the linter category
May i know the reason why the summary was created?Was that due to the reason that another page with similar error is created?
I'll respond on Topic:U8q07xrh4r67iql4 since this is related.
I am trying to add Orange colour in the page User talk:Neptunion under welcome and WP:TE[edit source] section. I tried many cases but I cannot add orange colour there. Please help.~~~~
Probably one of the more common occurrences I see for center use is centering a block object without text (notably images, but I've seen tables also), the fix for which is not text-align but instead <div style="margin: 0 auto"></div> or similar.
I would make the change but translatable pages make me sad. :D
If this is really a low-priority item, wouldn't it make sense for the help page to say something like, "If you are editing an article and find an obsolete HTML tag, of course it is OK to replace it, but eventually bots will be created to replace obsolete HTML tags, so there is no need to edit articles for the primary purpose of replacing HTML tags.
Funnily enough, there is a somewhat similar guide / help that does something like that in the parent page (Help:Extension:Linter#Goal: HTML5 output compliance). Adding it in the help here probably won't help much. Clearly it seems likely that you have missed it in the parent page, others will probably ignore this page altogether. It is just human nature.
In any event, since this is a wiki, one can act accordingly (improve it if need be).
U:Anomalocaris, let me add it to the help page so others aren't confused similarly.
Not all replacements seem to work. For instance, compare these 2 versions: before and after (the difference is in Paul's signature). How should this case be approached?
The page is discussing the fact that these tags are obsolete and in doing so also uses the obsolete tags themselves to demonstrate their usage. This means that this page will show up in the linter.
It might be preferable to either replace those obsolete tags with Templatestyles, inline styling, or simply use screenshots because if / when these tags do become obsolete the rendering here will not show things as intended in certain browsers.
Actually I had knowingly decided to use them in a first time in order to compare and prove their rendering with their alternatives, in a dynamic way which a screenshot could not provide.
So to my mind these examples are not "ironic" but a relic to treat at the very end of the migration process they describe.
Well, that's counter intuitive, it is like a doctors telling a patient that smoking is bad for them while they actually smoke in front of the patient (and make the patient worse). A documentation that talks about good practices should avoid bad practices while doing it, because it encourages the reader to simply ignore such contradiction or simply believe that its authors are either lying or don't know what they are talking about.
It is likely that people already have a hard time believing that doing something like this is worth their time as the prior thread shows. Including such "live" examples will likely make matters worse.
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