1328439 - Generate report of pages using deprecated HTML features

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org :: Security, enhancement, P5)

Description

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

What problem would this feature solve?
======================================
We have an extensive list of HTML elements, CSS attributes, and other HTML features that we allow on MDN pages, to allow demonstrations of HTML features:

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/blob/master/kuma/wiki/constants.py

A HTML sanitation library called "bleach" is used to remove features that are not on the allowed list:

http://bleach.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

We'd like to support a smaller subset of HTML on wiki pages, and move most of the remaining code to live samples, CSS classes, and other more secure methods.  However, it is difficult to tell what existing pages are using these HTML features, so we can determine if they are necessary or could be taken off the allowed list.

Who has this problem?
=====================
All contributors to MDN

How do you know that the users identified above have this problem?
==================================================================
Reducing the allowed feature list has been a long-term goal (bug 818966). Progress has been stalled for years, and a new technique is needed.

How are the users identified above solving this problem now?
============================================================
A way to use an "almost empty" whitelist was added in bug 834297. This may have been used during the initial conversion from DekiWiki to Kuma, but does not appear to be part of the current workflow for MDN staff or volunteers.

Do you have any suggestions for solving the problem? Please explain in detail.
==============================================================================
1) Identify allowed features that we'd like to deprecate and remove.
2) Periodically generate a report of English pages that use that feature
3) Encourage core contributors to remove those features from the source documents, and identify pages where the feature is being used to serve the documentation.
4) When the feature count goes to zero, remove the feature from the allowed list.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
Contributors helping with this project should be comfortable using the "source" editing mode.  It may be useful to allow them to regenerate the report after doing a significant amount of work, instead of waiting for the periodic report to run.

Comment 1

[Claas Augner [:claas]]

The MDN content has been migrated from HTML to Markdown, and we no longer use bleach, so I will close this as wontfix.