@thiemowmde
I think the second solution is maybe better. And I think that we can check the data type of property to confirm whether it is URL or not. If the date type of property is URL and the site have enabled Language Converter, the output does not format with variant code block.

Change 356801 had a related patch set uploaded (by Thiemo Mättig (WMDE); owner: Thiemo Mättig (WMDE)):
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Optimize VariantsAwareRenderer to not output broken weblink syntax

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/356801

@ssastry was this tied to the recent preprocessor change? Thanks.

Or @cscott FWIW.

In T166429#3312548, @Elitre wrote:

@ssastry was this tied to the recent preprocessor change? Thanks.

The preprocessor change was deployed to these group2 wikis on June 1 and the bug report and other discussion is from before that. So, that indicates this is unrelated to the preprocessor change.

This is not related to the preprocessor change, it is long-standing bug in php LanguageConverter (to wit, conversion is applied at an awkward point in the parser pipeline, so it doesn't properly respect other syntactic structures). Sadly, LanguageConverter is riddled with these, although I've been making slow progress fixing them.

I personally prefer solution three above: there is no reason to make the URL vary by selected variant, only the link caption should change. Effectively solution three would wrap the language variant inside the <a> tag, while the autolink behavior would emit multiple <a> tags inside the variant markup.

In T166429#3309853, @Cwek wrote:

@thiemowmde
I think the second solution is maybe better. And I think that we can check the data type of property to confirm whether it is URL or not. If the date type of property is URL and the site have enabled Language Converter, the output does not format with variant code block.

In T166429#3312739, @cscott wrote:

This is not related to the preprocessor change, it is long-standing bug in php LanguageConverter (to wit, conversion is applied at an awkward point in the parser pipeline, so it doesn't properly respect other syntactic structures). Sadly, LanguageConverter is riddled with these, although I've been making slow progress fixing them.

I personally prefer solution three above: there is no reason to make the URL vary by selected variant, only the link caption should change. Effectively solution three would wrap the language variant inside the <a> tag, while the autolink behavior would emit multiple <a> tags inside the variant markup.

A combination of 2 and 3 is ideal. Where there is no reason to emit a language variant (as in this example), it makes sense to adopt 2. But, when necessary, I think we should generate wikitext that parses to a reasonable looking DOM structure. So, [URL -{text1;text2}-] is preferable to -{link1;link2}- ... the principle being to restrict variant code to the smallest well-formed DOM construct.

Change 356801 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] Optimize VariantsAwareRenderer to not output broken weblink syntax

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/356801

Hm, remember that -{...}- markup can have side effects (ie, adding a rule to the conversion table) if the codes involved are languages, not scripts. Seems like you ought to be a little careful, since the "escape" function being used can have nonlocal effects...

@cscott, I'm afraid I don't understand. Is your comment a response to something specific that was said before? Do you think there is something we can improve, in addition to what https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/356801 already did? What "nonlocal" effects do you mean?

@thiemowmde Nevermind, I got a little mixed up. I was concerned that -{zh:Foo;zh-tw:Bar}- would add an entry to the global translation table, in addition to specifying a one-time conversion. But that's not the case. You need to add the A or H (or -) flag to have global effects.