Re: HTML/XML Task Force Minutes, 21 Dec 2010

On 21.12.2010 22:09, Norman Walsh wrote:
> ...
>     Henri: The situation before the HTML5 spec is that IE was implementing DOM
>     Level 1 so IE didn't recognize DOM Level 2 in the implementation sense.
>     But gecko, presto, and webkit were implementing DOM Level 2.
>     ... So in all browsers except IE, the view to the data model has been the
>     same for years. There were inconsistencies across the XML/HTML data
>     models, especially with respect to namespaces.
>     ... HTML5 has codified the resolution of these inconsistencies. Now the
>     data model is the same for XML or HTML, with a few small differences in
>     the details.
>     ... Once the parser is done, the data model is the same now. That's
>     something that's an achievement of HTML5. The same approach already
>     existed on the non-browser side.
>     ... First tagsoup and now HTML5 conformant parsers provide the same kind
>     of API for both XML and HTML5. So I think we've gone a long way to unify
>     the data model.
>     ... This means that as far as the stack goes, we've already done much of
>     the unification. You can, for example, use an XSLT engine on HTML5 using
>     the output of my HTML5 parser. It just works, whether the input is XML or
>     HTML5.
> ...

Actually, that's not entirely true. (Unless I'm missing a new development).

The HTML5 parser can be used on XML source, but it will absolutely not 
produce the data model you want.

So, in practice, you can't swap in a different parser, you still need to 
switch between the parsers based on the media type.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2010 21:38:32 UTC