Editing Incubator escapee wiki:FAQ/Technical (section)

==Why not use [[HTML]]?==

:The short answer is: for simplicity and security.

:And now the longer answer. Wikipedia, and [[wiki]]s in general, are meant to be edited on the fly. HTML is not easy to use when you simply want to write an article. Creating links gives us a particularly dramatic example. To link to the Paris article using HTML, one would have to type

::<nowiki><a href="/wiki/Paris">Paris</a></nowiki>

:Using MediaWiki markup is much easier:

::<nowiki>[[Paris]]</nowiki>

:A special markup language even allows you to "transclude" special snippets of code, called [[Wikipedia:Template index|templates]], into wiki pages. (You can also "substitute" the code for that template, effectively copying and pasting it into the document.)

:Then there's security. Different [[web browser]]s have bugs that can be exploited via HTML. Malicious users could also do things like [[JavaScript]] popup windows or page redirects if they had full HTML ability on Wikipedia. Several "experimental" sites that allowed full-HTML editing have suffered such attacks, including a couple of other wikis that allowed arbitrary HTML.