Help:HTML in wiki
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Permitted HTML
The following HTML elements are currently permitted:
For many HTML elements, more convenient wikitext code is available, see Help:Editing. On the other hand, HTML tags allow an id that can be referenced in one's user style css, and allows the tag to be used as link target.
For example, the anchor element <a> is not allowed, so the wikitext
-
<a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/">Main Page</a>
is treated like the wikitext
-
<a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/">Main Page</a>
and is therefore displayed as
- <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/">Main Page</a>
which is unlikely to be what the editor intended. Instead of using the anchor element (<a>) the wiki markup for external reference is recommended (enclosed in square brackets with the URL separated from the contents by a single space):
-
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/ Main Page]
displays as:
The following excerpt from Sanitizer.php additionally shows which attributes are allowed.
<source lang=php> $htmlpairs = array( # Tags that must be closed
'b', 'del', 'i', 'ins', 'u', 'font', 'big', 'small', 'sub', 'sup', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6', 'cite', 'code', 'em', 's', 'strike', 'strong', 'tt', 'var', 'div', 'center', 'blockquote', 'ol', 'ul', 'dl', 'table', 'caption', 'pre', 'ruby', 'rt' , 'rb' , 'rp', 'p', 'span' );
$htmlsingle = array(
'br', 'hr', 'li', 'dt', 'dd' );
$htmlsingleonly = array( # Elements that cannot have close tags
'br', 'hr' );
$htmlnest = array( # Tags that can be nested--??
'table', 'tr', 'td', 'th', 'div', 'blockquote', 'ol', 'ul', 'dl', 'font', 'big', 'small', 'sub', 'sup', 'span' );
$tabletags = array( # Can only appear inside table
'td', 'th', 'tr' );
</source>
Tags
Template:Mlw is a generic inline text container.
<font> is a similar tag which is deprecated (should not be used) in favor of <span>.
For example <source lang=html4strict> a red word. </source> produces the same result as <source lang=html4strict> a red word. </source>
See also Template:Tim and Template:Mlm.
It's pointless to combine the legacy tag <font> with inline CSS; legacy browsers would ignore the CSS, while modern browsers support <span> (see above).
Note that in most cases, one can use a more descriptive tag, for instance, <strong> to indicate an important piece of text, or <em> (subject to the same things as strong) to indicate an emphasized piece of text.
This not only draws the user's attention to the text, but can also alert those who are using nonvisual browsers or have sight impairments, etc. to the fact that that is emphasized text.
<div>
<div> is a generic block container. Rules:
- <div> should be followed by a newline
- </div> should be preceded by a newline
- </div> followed by text on the same line, two newlines and text before <div> on the same line should be avoided (because the two newlines only produce a space)
Example:
Attributes
Most tags can have a style attribute. For example <source lang=html4strict>
This is red text.
</source> produces:
This is red text.
Most tags can have classes and IDs. They can be used in conjunction with stylesheets to give a piece of text a descriptive class (or unique identifier) and to refer to that in a stylesheet.
For example
<source lang=html4strict>
</source>
Produces the box which floats on the right because infobox class is already defined in local Mediawiki:Common.css.
Classes and IDs can also be used by Javascript code, for example see how {Link FA} works in enwiki.
Another attribute example is title, for example used in Template:Tl template: note the hover box over "20000 ft"
"a height of Template:H:title above sea level"
Tags with special effect
Pre
<pre> tags work as the combination of <nowiki> and the standard HTML <pre> tag: the content will preformatted, and it will not be parsed, but shown as in the wikitext source. If you want preformatted but parsed text, use a space in the beginning of the line instead. For example,
<pre>This word is <b>bold</b>.</pre> This word is <b>bold</b>.
will render as
This word is <b>bold</b>.
This word is bold.
Comments
HTML comments in the wikitext (<!-- ... -->) will not appear in the HTML code at all.
Headers
Headers (<h1>...<h6>) will be treated in a similar way as wikicode headers:
sample header
Note that it appears in the table of contents and has an accompanying edit link. There are some minor differences though: editing such a section won't prefill the edit summary, and the browser won't jump to the beginning of the section when saving the page. Thus, you should use the wikitext equivalents instead.