VisualEditor caused this dirty diff (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_South_Korean_idol_groups_%282010s%29&diff=559356009&oldid=559228059) when editing a table. Note the removal of the empty small elements, and the change to the align syntax.
Version: unspecified
Severity: major
(In reply to comment #0)
VisualEditor caused this dirty diff
(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.
php?title=List_of_South_Korean_idol_groups_%282010s%29&diff=559356009&oldid=5
when editing a table. Note the removal of the empty small elements, and the
change to the align syntax.
The removal of empty text annotations has been fixed as of wmf7 (gerrit 68213 and gerrit 68190), which is now deployed a week early on enwiki to fix this and other issues - sorry about that. This will stop "the removal of the empty small elements", and consequently the changes to the table syntax that Parsoid does on lines that aren't otherwise changed.
The non-semantic syntactical change of the HTML syntax is, I believe intentionally done by Parsoid to normalise the wikitext; it is only done on lines of wikitext that are changed anyway by user action (unless there's a bug in VisualEditor which causes the contents of the HTML to change unexpectedly, as was the case here).
Consequently marking as "fixed".