Specs/HTML/2.8.0

This page defines a MediaWiki-specific DOM based on HTML5 and RDFa. The semantics of MediaWiki-specific functionality are encoded using RDFa.

Upcoming changes
See Specs/HTML/Experimental for discussion of potential upcoming changes to this spec.

Changes since Specs/HTML/2.7.1

 * None. The version was bumped because RESTBase ignores patch level versions for the sake of content negotiation, see T337596

Changes since Specs/HTML/2.7.0

 * T314097: Add a class (mw-file-element) on the media element in the media structure
 * T294621: Remove special handling for DISPLAYTITLE and DEFAULTSORT magic words. Parsoid no longer generates meta tags for these and generates a span with mw:Transclusion type as if they were just any other transclusion. The reasoning for this is in the commit message of this patch.

RDFa structures
Global prefix mappings:
 * Convention: Capital for types, lowercase for attributes.
 * Generally use the prefix instead of vocab definitions to avoid clashes (and allow mixing) with user-supplied RDFa. User-supplied RDFa with the mw prefix is moved to a non-clashing prefix in Parsoid.
 * Generally use the prefix instead of vocab definitions to avoid clashes (and allow mixing) with user-supplied RDFa. User-supplied RDFa with the mw prefix is moved to a non-clashing prefix in Parsoid.

Versioning
An integer version number is set in the head section of the returned HTML document. This version is incremented whenever this DOM spec or any other important aspect of the Parsoid HTML output changes. See for details. For backward-compatibility reasons, this information is also available in a  tag with the   property, but this will eventually be deprecated.

ID attributes on all elements
In pagebundles, we assign ID attributes to all elements, and use this to associate external metadata with those elements: Element_IDs. So far, we've moved data-parsoid (private, so should not matter to users) and will likely also move data-mw (public) from the DOM into JSON objects keyed on the ID.

Note about typeof and rel attributes
While a lot of examples below have a single value for the typeof attribute, in general, the typeof attribute can specify multiple space-separated values. For example  is not that uncommon. Similarly  is also not going to be that uncommon. Clients inspecting the typeof attribute value should handle this appropriately. When using CSS selectors, use  to account for the presence of multiple space-separated type strings (in the same way that you should already be using the   selector to account for space-separated values in   attributes).

The  attribute can also be multi-valued in the same way, and typically are in cases such as.

Expectations of editing clients
This section only applies to clients that edit HTML and expect to convert that HTML to wikitext without introducing unrelated diffs in that wikitext.

''FIXME: This section probably needs some updates: (1) Subbu would like to rename  to. (2) Probably need to refine the "DOM subtrees marked up with...they don't understand" section to include (or explicitly exclude) unknown annotations.''

A  protects DOM structures from any editing. Clients are expected to preserve / protect subtrees marked as such. Clients are also expected to preserve any DOM subtrees marked up with,  ,   in the http://mediawiki.org/rdf/ namespace they don't understand. This decouples clients from Parsoid development, and lets them concentrate on editing constructs whose special semantics they understand without having to implement all possible content elements.

FIXME; see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T303298#7761772

Exceptions
Captions contained within media can be modified, for example a  within a. An exception to this exception would be when the media is itself generated by a transclusion, so a  which also has   or an about attribute. See template markup.

Modules tags available in
Three meta tags are inserted, when required, to the of the page, to communicate the list of style modules, general modules, and Javascipt configuration variables used on the page. These are, respectively, the properties ,   and. Clients can use information from these meta tags to construct appropriate ResourceLoader URLs to fetch the modules.

Example:

Headings and Sections
Status: Implemented. Tracking bug for sections; tracking bug for HTML5 IDs.

Given the illustrative wikitext: The corresponding HTML DOM would be: Note the following properties:
 * There is always a  tag for the lead section, even if it is empty.  It will be the first   tag in the document, and will have   unless it is uneditable.
 * The  attribute will either be   or greater and correspond exactly to a PHP section ID (as used for   for example), or will be   (indicating an uneditable non-pseudo section) or   (indicating a pseudo-section, which is also uneditable). Further discussion at Parsing/Notes/Section Wrapping.
 * There will be a element as the first child of  if it is not a pseudo-section.
 * The  attribute on the  element matches the 'html5'  .  If needed, an empty  with   will be added to hold an   attribute matching the 'legacy'  . The   attributes and the empty spans are ignored during serialization back to wikitext; only the contents of the heading element are significant.
 * The tags are properly nested.

Images
Status: Implemented. Tracking bug.

In the examples below, the original size of the example image is 1941 × 220 pixels (these are the dimensions of the Foobar.jpg used in parserTests). The width and height in the DOM represent the actual scaled image height (not the bounding box dimensions specified in the wikitext). When image dimensions are modified or images with a non-default size are created, we will serialize to a square bounding box around the given width and/or height attributes. In the future: When using a (possibly scaled) version of the default thumbnail size, we will serialize using the  or   option to enforce a square thumbnail bounding box (see ).

The basic tree structure of all images, regardless of formatting options, alignment, or thumbnails, is: The outer &lt;figure&gt; element needs to become a &lt;span&gt; element when the figure is rendered inline, since otherwise the HTML5 parser will interrupt a surrounding block context. The inner &lt;figcaption&gt; element is rendered as a  attribute in this case (since block content in an invisible caption would otherwise break parsing). The inner &lt;a&gt; element needs to become a span if there is no link; see. An "alt" attribute on the &lt;img&gt; is present if (and only if) the "alt=" options are present in the wikitext markup. If the "lang=" option is present, the &lt;img&gt; tag will have a "lang" attribute. The "resource" attribute on the &lt;img&gt; tag specifies the wiki title and namespace for the image (so it doesn't have to be reverse-engineered from the "src" attribute); it should point to a relative URL based on the image title. The "link=" option will be present in generated wikitext if and only if the "resource" attribute of &lt;img&gt; differs from the "href" attribute of the &lt;a&gt; tag.

The &lt;img&gt; tag will have,  , and   attributes indicating the original (unscaled) size and type of the image. See.

Summary of semantic info for images
Summary of semantic info that is present in the HTML generated for images:
 * wrapper node: for block images and  for inline images
 * typeof attribute on the wrapper: mw:File, mw:File/Thumb, mw:File/Frame, mw:File/Frameless for different image uses
 * figure classes: mw-valign-{baseline,middle,sub,super,text-top,text-bottom,top,bottom} are only applied to inline media (rendered as ): mw-halign-{left,right,center,none} and optionally mw-image-border and mw-default-size for full-size images and thumbs scaled to the wiki's and user's default thumb size
 * figcaption sub-element: The caption
 * resource attribute on image: link to image resource page. TODO: what to use for images from commons?
 * width and / or height on image: scaled image size. Only one of width or height is fine for easier client-side scaling without aspect ratio issues.
 * alt attribute on image: alt property
 * src attribute on image: thumb governed by explicit thumb option or implicit from image
 * href attribute on a around image: link target, normally just the image page- BUT a element can be absent if link is explicitly empty.

Specific image examples
Without a link, we use the same basic DOM structure, but use a span instead of an a wrapper :

Adding 'left' causes the image to be rendered in block context, so the outer becomes a :

(Note 5)

Scaling, vertical alignment of an inline image:

Caption (containing disallowed markup) on an inline image:

(Note 5)

(Note 3, Note 4)

(Note 3)

(Note 5)

Note that "border" can be combined with "frameless".

(Note 5)

Manual thumbnails; note that the  attribute points at the original image, the   attribute points to the manually-specific thumbnail image, and the   attribute indicates the resource name of the thumbnail (so it doesn't have to be inferred from the  ):

Resizing images with the "scale" option:

Resizing thumbs with the "scale" option (this is a square 220x220px bounding box, see ):

Resizing with the "upright" option (note that this is converted to an appropriate "scale" option, see above):

See enwiki help for all options, see mw for inline/float details

Note 3: The PHP parser adds a  element inside the &lt;figure&gt;. Parsoid adds this with css (see T329413 where, in some cases, the css implementation is insufficient and further development is needed).

Note 4: The default thumbnail width is a user-specified preference for the PHP parser. Parsoid uses a fixed 220px thumbnail width. The "mw-default-size" class indicates "no size given" and can be used to resize thumbs according to user preferences.

Note 5: In this example, the caption is not visible in PHP output, so the there should be a rule in the default stylesheet like (IE7+ and other modern browsers):

Audio/Video
Status: Implemented. See tracking bug for details.

The basic  wrapper for audio and video media is identical to that for images, described in the section above, including provisions for inline players and captions. (Note that the PHP implementation does not properly render manual thumbnails or inline.)

The inner  element tracks the elements emitted by the video.js implementation in T100106.

Notes:
 * As a general rule, attributes derived from inspection of the original media file (original size, etc.) get  prefixes.  Attributes of derived/transcoded media get plain   attributes.  See T133670
 * The and  tags are ignored during HTML-to-wikitext serialization; all information encoded in wikitext is represented on the, , , and  elements.
 * The wikitext  option does not exist for audio / video (it can be specified but is not added to output, since the html5 spec defines that it should not be present since accessibility for a/v is via captions specified by the  element).  It is represented in our html as a hidden attribute in.
 * The wikitext  option does not exist for audio / video (it can be specified but is not added to output, since we want the clicks to play the media, not follow a link) --videos always produce , never  .  It is represented in our html as a hidden attribute in.


 * The wikitext,  , and   options are deprecated and we mark them as bogus options, surfaced in linter for editors to clean up.  See T134880 and T135537
 * Since it is not guaranteed that the original file is one of the sources listed, the  attribute on  represents that data.

More examples
The  option is editable through a   attribute and influences the seek time of the poster.

The  and   options are editable through   attributes and influence the media fragments  on the source urls.

Browsers will ignore dimensions on elements but we supply them to be enforced dynamically, if desired. See T133673

Other Media
Some complex media, like PDFs, permit previewing with the "page" option:

Missing media
If Parsoid fails to fetch the media info for a file, it keeps the same structure with stuffed span in place of the media element and links it to the missing media. See T169975

If alt text would have been present on the media, the link content will be the alt text. Otherwise, the filename is used. See T273014

Wiki links

 * The href attribute is UTF8 (as everything else), with a relative link prefix that always navigates up to the top of the wiki namespace, especially in subpages / pages containing slashes in the title. Example: './Foo', or (in a subpage) './../Foo'. We percent-encode percents and question marks in hrefs to support following links to wiki pages with question marks in their name. On the way in (when posting HTML to Parsoid) we assume href values to be urlencoded and decode them during serialization. Modified link hrefs without ./ or ../ prefix are temporarily assumed to be absolute to the wiki namespace for now, but will also be interpreted as relative to the page soon to support relative links in other HTML content. After that change, the equivalent of an absolute wikilink  would need to return an href="/Foo" instead.

Link with tail:


 * Red links (wikilinks pointing to a non-existing page) also add the  and   URL parameters to the link target. The red link is also enriched with internationalization information that will eventually help resolve the link title to a localized version of "Title (page does not exist)" (see Internationalization). As an example,   gets rendered as:

Media links
Media links of the form  or   are a special case of wikilinks and are represented as below. Note the mw:MediaLink rel attribute value.

Autolinked URLs
Historically these are sometimes referred to as "free" external links, as they are unconstrained by bracket delimiters.

Numbered external link
The CSS styling for these links is usually a bracketed number, such as.

Nowiki blocks
There are two options to handle nowiki editing:
 * 1) Strip the tags from the DOM and let the serializer add those that are needed after each edit
 * 2) Keep them in the DOM for more accurate round-tripping of manually created nowiki blocks, and prevent non-text content from being entered into these blocks in the editor (TODO)

We picked option 2 for now. The nowiki content remains editable. If the content is modified in a way that makes nowiki unnecessary Parsoid can remove the wrapper in the serializer.

HTML entities
HTML entities are wrapped with a span tag with a mw:Entity typeof attribute. For example, in wikitext generates the following HTML output:

Editing clients that wish to prevent the entities from being decoded when transformed to wikitext have to wrap them with a span tag like above.

Display space
An  is a non-breaking space, added for the purpose of improving the visual display of punctuation, particularly for the French language. It's not present in the wikitext but added as a post-processing step on the output. (Previously, this had an additional  typeof, which was removed in T254502.)

Behavior switches
Behavior switches are primarily represented as a meta tag as a placeholder to mark the presence and place where the behavior switch showed up on the page. This lets editing clients support editing of these behavior switches in some fashion. The actual page modification that the behavior switch targets is not always flagged right now.

The table below shows the property string for the different behavior switch. The meta tag is of the form

Redirects
(T104502: This no longer creates a category.)

Note that interwiki links generate redirect tags; the client is responsible for not doing an HTTP 301 or 302 redirect to an external site.

Note that, unlike the PHP parser, using language links still generates correct redirect tags in Parsoid. The client is again responsible for not doing an HTTP redirect to an external wiki.

Regular transclusions
Many transclusion parameters contain arbitrary wikitext, styles, template names and other non-semantic / DOM strings. We also have very little information about the type of each parameter (TemplateData may eventually provide this). So for now, we will thus expose all attributes in the "wt" (wikitext) format:

The  property is used to associate additional information with each transclusion or extension fragment. This lets us support inline editing of things like infobox parameters in the future without changes to the JSON data structure.

Parameter names are represented by their index, if not explicitly named, or by the name that will be used when replacing them. In the case that the normalized parameter named is different from the actual parameter name in the text, a key.wt attribute is used to keep the name as it appears in the text. For example:

Compound content blocks that include output from several transclusions like this football table is represented by interspersing wikitext strings with transclusion information in the data-mw.parts array:




 * $$1+1$$
 * }
 * }

Editing support for the interspersed wikitext is difficult to implement on the server side, as those wikitext edits need to be restricted in their effect to the original DOM range. A potential solution to this could be to wrap the multi-template compound block into a template hook that expands its content to a well-balanced DOM structure. Arbitrary wikitext edits within this tag would still only affect the original DOM range, both in Parsoid and the PHP parser. This is lower priority though, so for now the interspersed wikitext will be read-only.

Variables and Parser Functions
These other magic words render similarly to templates but have a function property in their data-mw, as opposed to an href. For example, the wikitext  renders as,

Generated attributes of HTML tags
Status: Implemented. See

This is the representation of attributes in links, tables, and html tags whose keys and/or values were not present as literal text in the input. When only attributes are affected, the element is be assigned an  typeof attribute and the   JSON object will provide additional specific information about the keys or values that are fully or partially generated. If other parts of the content are also transclusion-affected, the element will be marked up as a general transclusion instead.

It is conceivable to think up use-cases where part of an attribute value is generated by a template (ex: color of a background-color of a style attribute), but not as much for attribute-keys. This spec also assumes that a template can only generate one attribute rather than multiple attributes.

A few examples are worked out below.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

Parameter Substitution at the top-level
This section is only present for the sake of completeness. Unexpanded parameter markup is unlikely to be useful in top-level content, and if found, it is either a draft, syntax error, or a copy-paste without being fixed up.

This section specifies wrapping for parameter uses in the top-level namespace where all parameter substitutions evaluate to a null value. The structure borrows heavily from transclusion content, described above, with some slight divergences. The target corresponds to the parameter name, and the params contain the default value.

Extension tags
The data-mw attribute is a JSON object. It is meant as an extensible public interface, so more top-level members can be added. The top-level structure depends on the content type, with the main types being transclusions and extensions. See also the transclusion content section.

At present, Parsoid has few native extension handlers. See Specs/HTML/Extensions for details on editing their content.

Annotation tags
&lt;translate> One paragraph.

And another. &lt;/translate>

An annotated range is delimited by a pair of  tags with the following attributes:


 * : type of the annotation, value, where XXX is the type of the annotation, for the start tag;   for the end tag.
 * : is a JSON object used in other contexts of this specification. The annotation tags add the following attributes to it:
 * : identifier of the range, in the start tag.
 * : in both the start end end tag, contains the original position (start/end character) of the annotation tag in the original wikitext - effectively a copy of the  range in the   attribute (see Parsoid/Internals/data-parsoid for more information.)
 * : if the range delimited by the meta tags has been extended (see below), this property is set to  in the   attribute of the start   tag.
 * : if the original annotation tag has attributes (such as  for a  ), they are added as key-value in the   property of the   of the start   tag.

Range extension
If the range enclosed by the annotation tags in the wikitext does not correspond to a contiguous DOM forest, the range is extended so that it's the case. This means that the  tags generated by Parsoid are guaranteed to enclose a contiguous DOM forest. When the annotation range has been extended, it is marked with the property of the   attribute of the starting   tag.

Additionally, ranges can be extended due to the fostering of one or both ends of the range. In that case, the fostered content as well as the table(s) at the origin of the fostering are between two meta tags that are marked as an extended range definition.

Edits by clients are discouraged in extended ranges. If edits happen in an extended range, it can happen that the round-trip loses the initial position of the annotation in the wikitext, which would result in a larger portion of the wikitext ending up between the annotation start and end tags.

Annotations in attributes
It can happen that the annotated region of a tree corresponds to a single HTML tag attribute (or part thereof). This would for instance be the case for , which would annotate the   attribute of the corresponding hyperlink. In this case, the corresponding attribute is handled as in as expanded attributes. Additionally, the corresponding tag gets the  attribute corresponding to the annotation in the annotated attribute.

noinclude / includeonly / onlyinclude
We only care about these in the actual page context, not in transcluded pages / templates.

The content in includeonly blocks is exposed to clients for editing and diffing, etc. using the data-mw attribute.

Language conversion blocks
Status: experimental.

The attribute is named  since it affects the read-only rendering of the page, and   attributes are supposed to be ignored for rendering and only needed for editing.

Top-level fields in the JSON are:,  ,  ,  ,  , and. If the wikitext "show" flag is not present or implicit, the DOM markup will use the element. If "show" is present or implicit, the DOM markup will use if all possible contents are inlineable, or  otherwise.

Further discussion (and historical background) at and Language conversion blocks.

Error handling
See :
 * For API errors because of a non-existing image, data-mw.errors.key is set to "missing-image".
 * For API errors getting image info, data-mw.errors.key is set to "api-error" and data-mw.errors.message has more information about the specific error.
 * For image wikitext where a manual thumbnail is specified and it is not present, the data-mw.errors.key is set to "missing-thumbnail" and data-mw.errors.message is set to "This thumbnail does not exist.".

Ex:

Ex:

Internationalization
Parsoid can provide internationalization information that eventually gets localized in a processing later step when the language and message are available. Internationalized content can be inserted as a placeholder element or as tag attributes.

A placeholder element for an internationalized string is an empty span that has the value  in the set of its   attributes. A tag containing internationalized attributes has the value  in the set of its   attributes.

The internationalization information is contained in the  attribute of the internationalized element (placeholder or tag with attributes). The  attribute is a JSON associative array of JSON objects with the following structure:
 * The key is '/' when the information applies to a message to be inserted in the span placeholder. Other values are interpreted as the name of attributes.
 * The JSON object values have the following fields:
 * can have the value  for messages that should be displayed in the user interface language,   for messages that should be displayed in the page content language (modified by the user's preferred variant, if their preferred variant is the same base language as the page content language), or a fixed language code.
 * is the message key used in localization files to resolve the messages in the target language.
 * is an array of strings that can be used as parameters for the localized message.

Examples: will get, during the localization phase, for a page in English content, the  attribute with the value , corresponding to the content of the   message in the English language localization file, parametrized with.

The (empty) content of the span in will get, during the localization phase, for a user using an English language interface, replaced by "Invalid parameter in  tag".