Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

$F_{s(m)}={\frac {\sum [c'b+(W-ub)\tan \phi ']/m_{\alpha }}{\sum W\sin \alpha }}$

$m_{\alpha }=\cos \alpha \left(1+\tan \alpha {\frac {\tan \phi '}{F_{s}}}\right)$

Why : work as blockquote? I can write like above with source editor, but I can't do the same with visual editor. It looks odd when I have a look at the next equations.

$F_{s(m)}={\frac {\sum [c'b+(W-ub)\tan \phi ']/m_{\alpha }}{\sum W\sin \alpha }}$

$m_{\alpha }=\cos \alpha \left(1+\tan \alpha {\frac {\tan \phi '}{F_{s}}}\right)$

It's much stranger in the mobile version when I write like this.

blahblah blah blah. The equation is

$F_{s(m)}={\frac {\sum [c'b+(W-ub)\tan \phi ']/m_{\alpha }}{\sum W\sin \alpha }}$

$m_{\alpha }=\cos \alpha \left(1+\tan \alpha {\frac {\tan \phi '}{F_{s}}}\right)$

The : code, when used by itself, produces invalid HTML. The : dos not mean "indent". It means "mark this as the second half of an HTML definition list". Therefore, it should be used to make lists like the ones in w:en:Disease#Terminology, but not to manipulate the visual appearance.

Math editors have talked about fixing sitewide CSS to solve that problem, but I don't remember what the ultimate advice was. @Physikerwelt might be able to point you in the correct direction.

@Whatamidoing (WMF) I have not followed up the recent developments. To my understanding the German math community decided to write

:<math

rather than

<math display=block

. As an extension developer, I would recommend useing the built-in mechanism

<math display=block

. But this is biased. It looks like this on many wikis.

$$a+b$$

On enwiki, where the community decided to accept this encoding it looks almost identical to the : way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula#Display_attribute

Disclaimer: I do not understand why : is invalid HTML. It is wikitext. Invalid wikitext is to me not a good argument to justify a wikitext parser that generates invalid HTML. That sounds more like a bug in the wikitext parser.

; and : are defined in wikitext as producing the first and second parts of a definition list. Therefore, if you start a line with either of those characters, the parser will dutifully generate <dt> and <dd> tags around that line, because that's what you told it to do. Unfortunately, there is no "just slide this text over about a centimeter" code in wikitext.