[Haskell wikibook] Using XHTML Elements in the Wikibook

[apfelmus]

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