Re: An HTML language specification

Mark Baker wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:30 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
>> Or is the objection just to the way the parsing algorithm is specified and
>> not to the descriptions of individual elements?
> 
> It's both, to an extent.  The parser and much of the language is
> defined in DOM terms.  I haven't had a detailed enough look at the
> parser to know if the DOM gets in the way though, or if it can simply
> be used as an abstract model as the spec says ("Implementations that
> do not support scripting do not have to actually create a DOM Document
> object, but the DOM tree in such cases is still used as the model for
> the rest of the specification.").  As somebody pointed out, html5lib
> doesn't have a DOM, so that's an argument that it's possible. 

Hubbub, a C HTML5 parser library, does not make use of a DOM either.
Instead, it provides callbacks to the user of the library so they can do
what they want with the data.

> But I'm
> still wary of using an implemented model as an abstract one, lest
> nuances of the various implementations result in differing
> interpretations of the specification.

Given that Hubbub and html5lib use the same testsuite for parsing, it
seems that the nuances in different tree implementations are not an
issue.  I am not sure, in any case, what nuances these would be, since
HTML5 only requires a basic tree, e.g. where nodes in the tree have
parents, children, and siblings.

Andi