Parsoid/Parser Unification/Media structure/FAQ

What do you mean by media structure?
When files are included in a page, MediaWiki's parser outputs some HTML that represents that media for your browser to render. The choice of HTML tags and attributes are the structure we're considering.

What's wrong with the current structure?
It's mainly just a bunch of div tags, which are verbose and don't provide much meaning. This makes it inefficient to query and style, and not very accessible. See the RFC for the finer details.

What are you replacing it with?
We're replacing it with a specified structure that addresses some of the shortcomings of current structure. See the media section of the spec.

Why are you doing this now?
A medium term goal of the Content Transformers team at the WMF is to replace MediaWiki's legacy parser with Parsoid, a bidirectional wikitext to HTML5 parser. In order to get there, the legacy parser and Parsoid need to produce compatible HTML. Parsoid has been generating this new media structure for quite some time, to good effect. In order to lessen the disruption of changing parsers all at once, we're rolling out an isolated piece in preparation for further changes to come.

How has this been tested?
As we said, the output has been piloted in Parsoid, which is used is various live products, like Visual Editor and the mobile apps. Visual differences with this output have been noted and fixed over the years when editors open Visual Editor.

In addition, we've done several rounds of visual difference testing where thousands of pages are rendered with the old and new structure, and then taken a pixel by pixel comparison.

What's left to do?
Code that interacts with the page, like javascript for extensions, user scripts and gadgets.

How can you I help?
Test your code on the wikis we've deployed to ...