Parsing/Notes/Section Wrapping

TODO:
 * 1) Better terminology for the two different section notions: MediaWiki notion used by the section-edit interface, and the notion that will be represented by   tags in output
 * 2) Link up to other pages (wiki, phab, elsewhere) to make this discussion self-contained
 * 3) Any other language cleanup / tightening to clarify the problem, options, and solution space

Adding wrappers to HTML output
MediaWiki currently has a notion of a section which is used for section editing that is commonly used by editors to edit a small fragment of a page and avoid edit conflicts. This identification is regexp-based. Separately, T114072 is a proposal to add  tags to MediaWiki output. This page is a discussion about what the considerations and constraints are around adding these section tags.

Consistency requirements and why they matter
tags in output will be used by clients to either selectively load / display content of a page or to provide editing interfaces for just that part of the page. Consequently, it is important that there be some consistency in the two differing notions of sections. Here are some reasons for why this consistency is desirable. Note that a particular section definition and numbering are currently baked into the HTML output of PHP mediawiki, in the form of section edit links. These section numbers are present in cached HTML, and so changing them is relatively expensive.
 * 1) You want reading and editing tools to agree upon what a section is -- at least if you want editors to click on a section edit link and have the same section open up in the editor, and if you save a section you want to be sure that mediawiki replaces the correct section of wikitext. MediaWiki does this on the basis of section numbers so a mismatched section number or different section bounds can lead to page corruption on save.
 * 2) You want all editing tools (visual or source) to have a fairly agreed upon notion of what a section is -- or at the very least have an agreed-upon understanding of where the inconsistencies are and why they arise.
 * 3) If one tool is going to get a list of sections from the API and another tool might process the HTML and extract sections based on examining   tags, you want some agreements on whether the two are identical and if not, how the two differ and why they differ.

So, we need to identify a strategy based on product (editing, reading, tooling) needs:
 * 1) what kind of consistency requirements we are going to provide
 * 2) where the inconsistencies are going to be and why they arise
 * 3) provide a plan for what the normative / canonical / authoritative source of sections are and deprecate and remove the alternative version

Some consistency options
There are three possibilities here: It seems that guarantee 1 is the simplest to provide right now. Given unbalanced html tags and/or tags around multiple partial sections, 2. is harder to guarantee since it is essentially a requirement that content of every MediaWiki-section has well-balanced output. But, this isn't true right now. For example, see this section-edit form in the wikitext editor. There is an unmatched  tag there in the middle of the section. Given this, it is not possible to add a  wrapper around the contents of this MediaWiki section. (Note that mediawiki's section handling refers to "DOM" but they mean the tree-like structure emitted by the preprocessor, not a proper HTML5 DOM.)
 * 1) If HTML output has a   tag, there is a corresponding MediaWiki section that can be edited.
 * 2) If there is a MediaWiki section that can be edited, the HTML output for that wikitext fragment has a   tag around it.
 * 3) Both of the above are true which guarantees a 1-1 mapping between the two notions.

The expectation is that we want to gradually move MediaWiki output towards guarantee 3 (using our new tidy replacement to fix up unbalanced tags in sections), but we aren't there right now and don't want to block section wrapping on getting there first.

Plan of Record: Implementation proposal
Some of the difficulties discussed earlier are due to a conflation of what a section is in rendered output with whether it is editable. One way out of this is to separate these notions explicitly so that not all display sections need to be editable (but all editable sections should have a display component to them). This can be done by adding an attribute that indicates whether a section is editable via the section edit interface or not. This scenario shows up when we have  and other such tags wrapping multiple or partial sections. This also is the case when sections are generated by templates, for example, as in this revision. In both these scenarios, the individual sections cannot be edited directly. However, for reading and display purposes, mobile clients might still want to show them in Table of Contents and collapse individual sections. So, in this context, it seems it is better to separate the notion of a display section from an editable section.

We will focus on ensuring that any -wrapping solution provides guarantee 1 only for editable sections. With this guarantee, the set of sections that are wrapped in  tags and marked as editable are going to be a strict subset of the set of sections that MediaWiki knows about. This is not necessarily a problem. This just means that VE section editing or mobile notion of sections will have support for a restricted set of MediaWiki sections on pages. So, on pages with block tags around MediaWiki sections, there will be degraded functionality for reading and editing in certain clients. This doesn't introduce broken or inconsistent support for sections.

In order to provide this guarantee for editable sections, we are going to identify sections where Parsoid wrapping matches MediaWiki's notion of what that section is. Using Parsoid's DOM-to-wikitext mapping, it is relatively straightforward to verify this. But, because Parsoid will potentially omit some  tags that do not map directly to PHP sections, there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence of section numbering. That is, the "section number 2" baked into PHP's HTML edit links won't correspond to the 2nd  tag in depth-first preorder emitted by Parsoid -- in fact, Parsoid might not emit any   tag at all for a particular PHP section. In order to provide compatibility, we will add a  attribute to every   tag we emit identifying which PHP section number it corresponds to. This attribute implicitly identifies editable sections. So, any  without this attribute should be considered uneditable via the section edit interface.

Note that PHP uses "section 0" to refer to the lead section. This is consistent with the product need for MCS. We have to look at code a bit more closely to figure out whether we should mark this section editable or not.

Support in the PHP Parser
We are not going to provide this section wrapping functionality in the PHP parser right now because we cannot provide the guarantee we identified above without DOM-based processing. With RemexHTML the current plan is that PHP sections will (eventually) be balanced by default (see below for description of impacts on styling), which will allow us to then provide consistency guarantee 3.

Section wrapping algorithm currently used by MobileContentService
The section wrapping code in https://github.com/wikimedia/parsoid-dom-utils/blob/master/lib/sections.js was designed to satisfy the following requirements: Both of these requirements are based on product needs. The first is used to implement section loading, and in many cases to identify the lead section of a page. The second requirement aims to conform to user expectations as closely as possible, while also respecting the structural integrity of the page.
 * A page is a sequence of sections (which can include other nested sections). Content before the heading is wrapped in a section as well.
 * Sections are as fine-grained and as close to MediaWiki formatting and edit behavior as possible. Headings wrapped in s or tables are picked up, and introduce a section wrapper around the overall wrapper element.

This proposal conflicts with the consistency proposal above. Using these s with PHP APIs can easily introduce corruption (wrong wikitext bounds replaced by new content) or confusion (wrong bounds displayed to reader). They are also not interoperable with cached PHP HTML output, and the DOM walk can introduce sections which include a large amount of content before and after a heading and thus don't match users' expectations for section bounds, especially when there is an unintentional unclosed tag in the wikitext.

Long term: Supporting use cases for adding wrappers around multiple (partial) sections
So, why are editors adding div (or other block-tag) wrappers around partial sections or multiple sections?

Usually it appears to be in order to style a section, for example to highlight that portion of the page for action / attention. This is likely a use-case on user pages and other non-article pages like wikipedia or talk namespaces, for example where there might be a call to action or a notice or something that spans multiple sections.

Solution 1: Stronger consistency guarantee for the Article namespace only
Given this, one way to get to stronger consistency guarantees (2 and 3) is by restricting section wrapping to only the article namespace. In that namespace, we could provide the stronger guarantee by breaking some badly nested sections by independently DOM-balancing output for every section on its own. This will forcibly close unclosed  (and other "block") tags and discard stray closing tags. If we want to go down this route, we need to get a sense of usage of bad nesting in the article namespace and amenability of editors to fixing their pages that have this behaviour. The Linter extension can help precisely identify these set of pages. Other namespaces will have only a single  tag around the entire page.

Note however that this breakage will only be in Parsoid output (and hence clients that use Parsoid output - mobile, Visual Editor). But, since we are progressing towards adopting Parsoid output as the de facto output for MediaWiki, this is not a concern per se.

This would also break section editing and navigation for non-article pages.

Solution 2: Make it possible to style sections "properly"
For example (strawman alert!), one option would be to support "class" and "style" attributes on sections in the same way we do for table cells: which would generate: The  attribute could also be moved to the   tag. You would need to lint for all section titles currently containing a  character, and   the.

Another option would let the user write  tags manually in wikitext, which would then be detected and suppress normal   generation. The above example would then be written as: This is perhaps more "compatible" (no existing headings need to be 'ed, but rather encourages the use (advertent or inadvertent) of explicit  s which don't line up with headings: It's probably best to avoid candy machine interfaces of this sort which make it easy to generate bad results.

Plan of record: Provide other solutions for the use cases that require multi-section styling
The template styles system has just been rolled out on wikipedia. The long-term plan is to deprecate and eventually remove support for inline styles in wikitext, replacing it with template styles. Styled sections would thus be generated from a template, either inside the template body or as an argument (for example a heredoc argument). Section balancing will then be treated in a similar manner as template balancing, although we'd need to balance both sections and templates for similar reasons. The DOM tree will include non-section elements between s; that is, it won't be the case that all   tags will be direct children of either a   or   tag. This may interact poorly with the "list of sections" assumption made by MobileContentService.

NOTE: consider a template which contains two tags. If we need to emit a wrapper around the template contents, our choices are currently or. We may wish to consider emitting a as a wrapper as well, in order to allow the "parent of a is always either or " property of MCS to hold.