Last modified: 2013-06-27 21:54:14 UTC
Dirty diffs due to removing whitespaces from empty template fields, see URL.
And now the other way: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Laurentius_Autenrieth&diff=119897871&oldid=116249704 Whitespaces were added.
Currently our HTML -> WT serialization only modifies wikitext (if any) in edited sections. So, when templates are edited (as in this example), some whitespace normalization is inevitable since Parsoid does not carry around exact syntatic details (whitespace, quote chars) for every wikitext element. Once all the more higher priority bugs are ironed out, we could consider looking at improving the granularity of our selective serializer to look into template transclusion wikitext and identify individual modified parameters and use original source wikitext for unmodified parameters. So, long story short, at least for now, for modified templates, there will be some whitespace and quote diffs on some template transclusion wikitext. We had originally picked a default where we didn't add additional spaces around '=' chars. Now, based on discussion with the VE folks and other requests, we decide to go change the default to adding a single whitespace around '=' chars where necessary.
We have since made tweaks to regular (non-selective) serialization of template transclusions to minimize diffs in template params which should alleviate some of the dirty diffs (see below), but it will be hard to fully eliminate dirty diffs on edited templates. Closing this for now. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/70653/ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/70741/
