Funny. I entirely forgot that I had the same idea four years ago.

I see. Digits before and after, UBA is confused. Perhaps improved one day; an entire block of three groups only (digits letters digits) must not adjust order. There are older and newer versions of UBA, and they might depend on browsers.

If the entire content of a table cell is that parser function, the UBA does not influence anything.

• dir or <bdi> is important if a text fragment is embedded within inline fluent text in other directionality, especially if symbols or digits are direct neighbours of the insertion.
• In this case the symbols might be thrown to the wrong side, since they do not bear any directionality (letters do have a knowledge of themselves whether they are LTR or RTL). UBA might think that they should precede since they are following RTL.
• If the column width is greater than the parser function result, you might want to start an RTL date at the right cell border within a LTR page. However, such style="text-align:right" is not a property of the date, but needs to be applied to the entire table cell as block element.
• If inside the cell the parser function result is a mixture of letters with directionality and things with no directionality, UBA is made to arrange that in the appropriate order (as is).

In T223772#10226924, @IKhitron wrote:

And what about the directionality?

I’d assume most of the time this parser function will be used in contexts that have the given language already set (a table that has table-level lang and dir attributes, running text in that language etc.), so the extra markup would just clutter the HTML code without any benefit. Where do you expect to use a free-standing date, without, for example, a label that tells what on that date happens?

I see. For example, if this date is everything that exists in some table cell.

Please see my conversation above at Sep 10 2024, 03:46.

In T358497#10224220, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

BTW, if there is a transclusion {{ttt|thing|<div class="foo">Content</div>|another|named=value}} this is supposed to be resolved as:

• {{{1}}} → thing
• {{{2}}} → another

However, that was expected as:

• {{{1}}} → thing
• {{{2}}} → <div class="foo">Content</div>
• {{{3}}} → another

The assignment of the third parameter fails.

The Lua table is an object, not a sequence table.

I don’t think so. The very first words of the feature summary are The addition of – that is, it asks for something to be added, not something existing to be changed.

As soon as anything is implemented as proposed, the parameter mapping of all templates and/or modules would change. There is no distinction between those transclusions which shall be evaluated by new syntax and classic syntax.

Exactly. If a Scribunto-powered template makes use of this new feature, it should clearly mention that in the documentation. Processing such – from the parser’s POV broken – parameters should always remain a feature templates can opt into, never the default.

At least this will be an individual solution within one individual template somewhere.

• This task is about a global change of parameter handling by MediaWiki, and the approach is not suitable for all templates in all wikis.
• All assignments of named parameters are treated as if the parameter name and = are part of the value.
• The task description is supposing that all templates in all wikis have only unnamed parameters. This is obviously far from reality.
• The other way around works fine: Avoid unnamed parameters, migrate to named parameters and all = syntax issues are solved (trimming as well). German Wikipedia is migrating since the 2010’s and good new templates won’t introduce them.
• Frequently used templates in German Wikipedia do know which named and unnamed parameters are valid, and an assignment for a 1 by <span style="color:blue">blue</span> would create an unknown parameter name <span style and this will trigger error handling procedures.

The task is not only affecting Lua, but would need to be handled synchronuosly in template programming as well.

• Otherwise there would happen a different behaviour when changing the programming from plain template to Lua and back.
• Authors would need to know whether an implementation is using Lua processing or not, to provide the correct syntax.
• The implementation behind a template is a secret. That means: It is documented how to use a template, and a contract is made which result is expected. Within this contract it is open how to implement this, and the promised target might be reached by changing the programming at any time.

The detection of some = which should be taken as part of parameter value and some which should split parameter name and parameter value is not universal and impossible in general.

• HTML elements (or tags, in this case) are not replaced by the parser before evaluating the parameter value. This differs from MediaWiki tag extensions, where the entire content is hidden and replaced by a placeholder.
• There are too many cases where things like The <span style="color:blue">blue</span> flowers or Einstein’s formula E=mc² will contain = as text.
• Or perhaps the later one E=mc² could mean a parameter name E and a parameter value mc².

The issue is two decades old, and there are two common solutions:

1. Do not use unnamed parameters. If some can be omitted, it becomes cruel to assign the correct values in the right position. Named parameters are self-explaining and avoid misunderstanding the effect of the third assignment.
2. If unnamed parameters, then use 2= if a = might occur within values.

The workaround mentioned in introduction fails as soon a template is really expecting named parameters. It works if and only if all parameters are supposed to be unnamed.

• Typically, you have a few unnamed parameters, if any, for one or two mandatory parameters, followed by many options where the current ones are identified by name.

German Wikipedia is offering all configured minority languages in Central Europe including neighbour countries with German speakers, and migrated population to countries with German language, and further languages in the world with many million speakers.

There is a solution: T359582 (Define alt=- as intended presentational image).

@Ebrahim: FYI

Detected now: rMWc0af446dd0d9caf29cc75dd24ada21a0d742be7f

The major issue on this kind of magic is that they are a nightmare on parsing.

• And hard to understand and teach and describe to authors as well.
• It is blowing up syntax description and make things even more complicated.

@Legoktm: German Wikipedia discontinued to use RFC magic in article space for almost a year now.

In T151682#8967297, @matmarex wrote:

What would this message be used for?

In T355159#10065700, @Bugreporter wrote:

This can be resolved by T328254: Magic word variable for content model {{CONTENTMODEL}} plus T151682: Add a new MediaWiki system message as a content header inside #mw-content-text, but this requires an extension (PageNotice).

No idea what will happen finally, but if I am reading only a temporary name might be put into cookie immediately.

I do not think that any Wiki server could solve the problem, at least no trivial patch is meaningful.

I think this suggestion is already in some ticket. Just reminding here.

There came another accessibility issue from users:

• Some have difficulties with distinguishing blue and black.
• Some are not aware that it has an important effect when something in the toolbar is changing from black to blue. They do not know that they triggered unintentionally this mode, and they come to village pump crying that they cannot work any more.

The activated effect should be more obvious than just changing text colour.

• It should be inverted, whether icon only or both icon and text.
• It should be (dark) blue background for the entire field, and white icon and text if active.
• We do a similar thing with ticbox. They are a white square with black or blue borders if not active, and a blue square with white ticmark when activated.
• This change of background colour is very obvious, even if you are less aware or not equipped with best eyes.

An explicit text is better explaining than text markers which have cultural limitations to know such tool in real life nor connecting such unknown device with syntax analysis presentation.

The user magic might be just taken as a reminder.

I learnt that the update is productive now, but user language did not work on BETA ever.

General advice: Append a _ when page name is terminated by . or ) or similar.

• Then, after _, add a space or terminate.
• When the system (many are recognizing and automatically linking URL) is identifying start of URL at http: and termination, they interprete . or ) and more as surrounding punctuation, not part of URL, not included in target.
• If our URL is terminated by _ that one is taken as last character and part of generated link, if a space is following and will break URL identification.
• If any wiki server is receiving _ that is taken as space, and will be stripped since there are no spaces at the end of page names etc.

In T364685#9952638, @Jack_who_built_the_house wrote:

border: 1px solid var( --border-color-base, #a2a9b1 ); also works as advised in T368637#9942128.

I happened to dig out an &exactmatch= meanwhile.

In T368415#9928036, @DLynch wrote:

...as-written, isn't going to change anything in the output for galleries because File:Red eyed tree frog edit2.jpg|A caption and File:Red eyed tree frog edit2.jpg|A caption|alt=A caption produce the same output. If we actually want to suppress the doubling, we currently have to output an empty alt into the gallery definition.

In T368415#9926815, @DLynch wrote:

To summarize: current behavior for the gallery image dialog is that when you add a new image to a gallery we check the "use caption as alternative text" box by default. PerfektesChaos would like that box to not be checked by default.

To clarify: I do not want that the ticbox is not checked by default – no copy of the legend shall be established ever as “starting point” for |alt=, neither by default nor on request.

Yes, the ticbox creating a duplicate of the legend is entirely pointless.

• The legend is already told by screenreader.
• A duplicate of this text, telling the same story a second time, is annoying.
• German Wikipedia is going to run a bot for removing all short |alt= from file transclusion and gallery which are a copy of the legend or media descriptor.

Arrrgh. The language de-AT de-CH de-formal is also involved.

• However, in July 2023 it has been stated that the system message in native project language shall act as fallback if not defined for subtag.
• Therefore de-at de-ch de-formal were deleted in August 2023.

The behaviour according to T229992 or the famous language fallback chain does not work here.

• What is the exact algorithm for fallbacks? Which definition at which level will take precedence and will be defaulted to what when? The manual is not precise enough.
• We did remove many explicit fallbacks de-at de-ch de-formal which worked, but some did not. Why?

In T204201#9915821, @Od1n wrote:

Would it be difficult to bring compatibility with AJAX previews… if ever it's feasible?

It is common practice to use $.extend() for merging defaults and options in a cascading style.

• Code will provide defaults, subsequently combined with site → user → page modification.
• And yes, it is common practice to ignore undefined components since they are – deliberately undefined for this stage!
• Whether this is stated explicitly in any documentation or not, it is common understanding for decades. Undefined components are regarded as not provided. No difference was made ever between undefined or not occurring components; both have the same meaning. Even false may be regarded as refused assignment in certain cases.

The documentation bug on dewiki was just misspelling of the key, but the functionality is known to other people even those who never read such fine manuals.

The error occurred first immediately after distribution, but the code is of 2010.

• Here is the executed code unchanged since 2020 in this particular usage.
• Used more than thousand times every day for every source editing on dewiki.
• You took me already hours to track until this point, time I do not have and resources missing in other issues.

T368102 is the same story, and I guess there are many many more. Enjoy.

While this might be solved technically, the entire task is not a good idea for two reasons:

1. An issue cannot be solved within a few seconds like other LINT “errors”, adding a missing ' – it is actually not an error.
   1. It will need several minutes and requires creative writing and deeper understanding of the context of the image.
   2. There is no helpful guidance in most wikis, partial in enWP.
   3. The target is to write a text which is “illustrative” – if you close your eyes the image shall appear in your mind before you would have seen it the first time.
   4. If I am encountering an alt= I delete them in most cases. They do not describe, they are confusing, 50% are just repeating the legend which will be told twice to the blind.
2. AI (artificial intelligence) is currently conquering automatic image description for blind people, integrated in screenreader.
   1. They get a button “Tell me” for each image, and a few seconds later the speaker starts describing the image; much better than most wiki authors do.
   2. There are apps for mobile phones in daily usage now. Blind people hold the camera in the direction incognita, and after some seconds the phone tells about houses, streets, inscriptions of shops, plate with the street name or reading the plate of a monument. They are heading for a dialog, “Which shops are there?”, and the phone will answer “barber shop, grocery, tailor”.
   3. Within some years I guess alt= is history and a Nice-to-have rather than pushing people to equip web pages.

From my understanding the role= is applied to the wrapping element, and only this one is mentioned and linked when generating a TOC from all role=navigation or role=region elements (in addition to <h2> etc.). Same goes for each single role=alert which may consist of several content elements.

In T204201#9877960, @Od1n wrote:

Another issue: I have a case with a gadget ("Diaporama" here) that is defined with a "categories" condition, but this gadget may also be loaded using mw.loader.load()/ mw.loader.using() (by this script), on a page that does not have the category.

In T366314#9876423, @Jack_who_built_the_house wrote:

so it can be removed with no effect.

HTML 4.0 – While clear= has been adopted, float= was implmented in all major browsers. Since it worked, it was used. Apparently still today. I am living in the wwwworld since 1995. Nevertheless, all these HTML attributes were deprecated in 1998 in favour of CSS. Wikis were founded in 2001, none might have occurred ever in any Wiki, but you may scan English Wikipedia for quite common usage of align=.

Please note that there are other means in addition to <gallery> and File: transclusion.

In T366314#9873117, @hgzh wrote:

The italics rule is not present anymore in the current stylesheet.

The reason why float-(left|right) are preferred in German Wikipedia is that they provide a small margin-top. Therefore they can be stacked.

We are going to adopt templates to follow WMF properties for inverting dark mode, and we follow the WMF definitions and try to inherit some of those.

I just happened to run into this border-color mantrap.

@Uzume – If you are really expecting to violate page limitations, there is a hint, or hack.

How does this sound?

Some remarks:

• This should not be a separate Special:GadgetPreferences but part of Special:Preferences in Gadgets section, when entire usage of one particular tool can be toggled. If this tool is activated, the preferences GUI should appear immediately below (and vanish if toggled off).
• The JSON spec should be subpage like MediaWiki:Gadget-myTool/preferences.json, while site configuration might be MediaWiki:Gadget-myTool.json and implementation is at MediaWiki:Gadget-myTool.js
• Texts do need localization mechanism. A global root may contain English, French, Japanese and German, and on Commons users will expect their user language. Further translations need to be added easily by global collection of local languages.

Actually the redirect table could be a further candidate for indirect use of linktarget table, when both pagelinks and templatelinks table migration are completed.

In T174811#9711272, @MusikAnimal wrote:

In T174811#9709334, @PerfektesChaos wrote:

There is the module jquery.textSelection at rMW /src/jquery/jquery.textSelection.js

• This is wrapping access to selected text or cursor position independent of browser methods, and does also permit text changes at cursor position or replacing marked text range.

This does currently not support CodeMirror but native text <input> and <textarea>.

• It should cover CodeMirror and DiscussionTools transparently as well.

I think the idea is to do the reverse – editors are expected to ...

There is the module jquery.textSelection at rMW /src/jquery/jquery.textSelection.js

• This is wrapping access to selected text or cursor position independent of browser methods, and does also permit text changes at cursor position or replacing marked text range.

This does currently not support CodeMirror but native text <input> and <textarea>.

• It should cover CodeMirror and DiscussionTools transparently as well.

In a similar way I would like to get a wrapper around CodeMirror and DiscussionTools, which shall allow to deal with text fields no matter which mode the user currently toggled:

• Retrieve textarea#wpTextbox1.val() as entire text
• Assign textarea#wpTextbox1.val(s) to the entire story
• If currently in CodeMirror or DiscussionTools mode, then retrieve via the corresponding API; if native then jQuery .val() function.
• There is a second text field on Special:Upload.

In addition I want to explore whether the user input did change CodeMirror text and possible errors have been marked.

• It is sufficient to know that the text has changed, no matter whether by programmatic assignment of entire or partial text or mouse event or keyboard event. When it changed I can look for arriving or vanished error class elements.
• I need to know whether CodeMirror was activated or left. While no CodeMirror is active I do not need to look for error class elements. Events or mw.hook() shall be fired when CodeMirror toggled.

In wikitext (,.;? followed by whitespace or text end will trigger URL termination just before.

We have a similar problem on mentioning plain URL in wikitext, interpreting terminating interpunction characters as part of surrounding text rather than part of URL. The same goes for many messaging tools.

It did not disclose to me on uselang=qqx that message, therefore I did assume that no config message is available.

In T344378#9612154, @bvibber wrote:

Do we.... have a good high-level task for this that covers the conceptual feature for both ios and android and not low-level implementation details?

In T359582 I just complained that

there should be a separate Phabricator trail for alt= image descriptions (even video).

My comments on mw:Talk:Wikimedia Apps/Team/Android/Image Recommendations were already linked, but I do strongly oppose to make this a LINT nor Growth task.

Thanks for adding categories.

In T31272#9582536, @Bugreporter wrote:

Small wikis without IF-admin could manage offered gadgets and circumstances themselve.

Such issue should be solved by global gadgets.

One question arrived now: Is editing of any MediaWiki:Gadgets/ page requiring successor of previous editinterface or gadgets-definition-edit right?

A key in a JSON object is always a string. Therefore a number is impossible. However a Lua table needs to be a JSON object if any not one-based array shall be mapped.