Re: Support Existing Content

Dave,
The idea of converging on a parsing algorith, I have no quibbles
with.

I use your excellent work on HTML Tidy; I also use Daniel
Vaillard's excellent libxml and libxslt work to handle HTML goop
on the Web.
(And for those here who are not familiar with Daniel's work, and
usually assume that HTML and XML dont mix, look again --libxslt2
can run XSLT transforms on the most soupy tagsoup on the Web --
it does this by first maping the soup to a well-formed tree).
I've also benefited from John Cowan's excellent TagSoup
implementation.

All that said, I still dont want to see a language that "blesses"
  ill-formed authoring and turns it into something that all of us
  have to repeatedly implement.



Dave Raggett writes:
 > On Tue, 1 May 2007, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
 > 
 > > Also sprach T.V Raman:
 > >
 > > > Why aren't we defining Javascript the same way as what you
 > > > describe --i.e. make every failing program "somehow work".
 > > > Why aren't we even defining CSS that way i.e. "somehow make every
 > > > CSS rule parse and mean something."
 > > > Why is HTML special?
 > >
 > > CSS was designed with error recovery built into the syntax. If an
 > > unknown property or unit is used, the CSS specification describes how
 > > to handle it.
 > 
 > I think that we may differ on how effective CSS's error handling 
 > really is. It's great that there is a well defined way to resume 
 > parsing after finding something that isn't understood or which 
 > violates the grammar in someway, but CSS hasn't helped developers 
 > who are struggling to deal with browsers that vary considerably in 
 > their support for CSS. You have to learn all kinds of subtle rules 
 > of thumb which is a great shame for something that should be really 
 > simple.
 > 
 > In fact, one could say that the problems with CSS and scripting 
 > dwarf any interoperability problems with HTML itself. However, the 
 > idea of converging on the parsing algorithm for HTML is certainly 
 > attractive.
 > 
 >   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

Title:  Research Scientist      
Email:  raman@google.com
WWW:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/
Google: tv+raman 
GTalk:  raman@google.com, tv.raman.tv@gmail.com
PGP:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/raman-almaden.asc

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 18:26:34 UTC