Re: Formatting of html tags

I think it is important to display the angle brackets in the text, so that
the meaning does not get lost when the content is read as plain text
without formatting.  This is especially true for tag names that are also
common English words, like <code> or <use> or <object>.

On PhistucK's concern, that someone would copy&paste a sentence like the
above into an environment where they would then have to escape all the <
characters, I'm not sure how much of an issue that is.  More and more
commenting platforms (at least in places where people tend to comment about
code) have ways to escape inline code with Markdown syntax or similar.  And
on the other hand, if the angle brackets are displayed as pseudoelements,
then you lose some of the meaning when copying and pasting.

We also have to remember that WPD is designed to be edited by a large group
of people.  Requiring people to use complicated markup counteracts the
ease-of-editing from the semantic forms system.

The more pressing issue for WPD is the bug Pearl noted with the "Preview"
mode when using angle bracket-tags.

Mediawiki markup like


   -  the <code>&lt;tagName&gt;</code> tag

should display as


   -  the <tagName> tag

(plus the appropriate code formatting), but in Preview the extra angle
brackets are interpretted as an actual HTML tag, and it is either stripped
out by Mediawiki or is treated as an actual opening tag.

This *only* affects Preview mode; it displays fine on the actual page.
 However, it is a serious bug that makes the previews look broken.

Thanks for offering to file the issue, Pearl.  If anyone has any knowledge
of how the Mediawiki Preview mode works and why it is converting the &lt;
entities to < before including it in the webpage, please take control of
this issue.

ABR

P.S. If we *did* use CSS quotes to display the angle brackets, could I
suggest that the class be added to the <code> tag.  So, instead of
requiring people to type

   - <code><q class="markup-tag">tagName</q></code>

it would just be

   - <code class="markup-tag">tagName</code>

Note also that "html" is not a good class name for this purpose, since not
all mark-up tags are HTML, and the purpose of the class name may be a
little obscure for newcomers.


On 17 July 2014 14:30, Renoir Boulanger <renoir@w3.org> wrote:

> On 2014-07-17, 1:54 PM, PhistucK wrote:
> > While I like your suggestion, I fear that the name may get lost while
> > copying and pasting the content (pasting into an HTML source, for
> > example).
> > A solution could be to use pseudo elements for the angle brackets (or
> > something like <q class="html">html</q> and have this small CSS
> > snippet in a CSS file somewhere - q.html { quotes: "<" ">"; }, but
> > that may not be semantic...). The goal in doing this is to show angle
> > brackets, but ignore them when copying.
> I like that idea.
>
>
> Renoir
> ~
>
>
>