Hackasaurus or let's edit #HTML

Wikisyntax; it has people wake up screaming at night. Developers hate to touch the MediaWiki parser. Rumour has it there is maybe only one maybe two who have a fighting chance to work on it.

When Hackasaurus was introduced to me, it provided me with a tool to see how a page with multiple languages shows what expected HTML looks like: showing a language tag for content that is different from its surrounding content.

<p lang="nl"> and finally </p>

The fun thing of this tool is that you can change things easily. It is meant to be easy as it is intended to teach kids HTML. We specified the language in the "p" tag. It is very much a visual editor and even adults love it. Some people say; you can do with HTML-5 everything that wikisyntax allows you to do. As wiki syntax was meant to hide the HTML, it would be nice to consider if we have not come full circle and drop the Wikisyntax and just use the later version of HTML.
Thanks,
       Gerard

#HTML5 and language support

The technology behind the Internet #matures; and consequently HTML 5 is becoming ever more established. HTML 5 is an open standard and the W3C is the organisation where HTML 5 is defined..

Amir went to a conference, HTML5FEST in  Ramat-Gan, he met people from Google, Mozilla, the W3C. Going to a conference is where you can learn about how language support can be achieved in the future.

For Amir it is clear that improvements to the HTML 5 specifications can do with some tweaking. Going to a conference, learning how things are done and how to get suggestions in can be more effective then writing code for a month, maybe more.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Google supports the latest browsers

Supporting old old browsers is expensive. Not only are many old browsers less compatible with standards, they also do not support emerging standards like HTML5. The continued support for IE6 in MediaWiki prevents the adoption of new technology.

People who blog using Blogger have been informed that only the latest two releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will be supported from August 1. It also states that this will also affect popular Google applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.

Let us hope that Google will be able to force people to use an up to date browser; this will make the development of MediaWiki a lot easier and a lot less expensive.
Thanks,
       GerardM