Re: validator modularization (aka unicorn) and micro-observers framework

On 4/26/06, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> The model would have "What is this" and "Who should handle this". Who
> should handle something is a subset of "Who can handle this". I'm not
> sure the sets are equivalent. As an example, in the following XSLT
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#result-element-stylesheet the content "is"
> XHTML and XSLT at the same time, but should only be processed by the
> XSLT checker. Another example is link checking, while sometimes you
> might want to check for conformance and broken links at the same time,
> e.g. when the W3C Webmaster checks a document against pubrules, you
> typically just want to check for conformance.
>

In fact, when I was saying "I can handle it", I was also thinking about a
sort of priority.
For example, the link checker would have a lower priority for XHTML
documents than the markup validator... So if someone asks only for a link
check on a XHTML document, the link checker will be called. If we also ask
for a markup validation, then the markup validator will process the document
(because it has a higher priority on (X)HTML documents) and give the content
of 'a' tags to the link checker.
Another possibility would be to always delegate the parsing of a document to
the "best" observer (even if we are not interested in waht it checks and
have to forget the result of the check or validation).