Board Thread:New Features/@comment-2240397-20161117114915/@comment-24473195-20161117125547

Speedit wrote:

Dessamator wrote: As far as standards are concerned, they are the main reason wikis can exist. Most editors do not possess any knowledge of website design or website administration. Wikitext itself is a big mess because it lacks any standards. I would add that its indeed better to give people the freedom for a range of customization, so long as its within a standard that ensures its clean and maintainable by other users. A standard that is too lax tends to cause a mess. SVG is a reasonable standard but is well known to cause a lot security and usability issues. Too much freedom of customization  creates a problem when people can't migrate away from it without losing data. Case in point, wikitext isn't particularly the same in every mediawiki version, and because it has no standards, bugs may be treated as features, and features may be treated as bugs. There are also different versions of wikitext that don't conform to the same rules as the "normal" mediawiki.

These portable infoboxes differ because one can easily import them to something like a word processor, and very quickly create a document that contains that information. This can be done without fighting with wikitext or worrying about hundreds of parser functions that alter its output.