[Bug 13113] Parsing algorithm should not preclude Complex Ruby

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13113

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

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--- Comment #1 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 2011-07-01 22:20:54 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #0)
> 
> We shouldn't paint ourselves in the corner with the parsing algorithm so
> Complex Ruby can't be introduced in the future without causing ungraceful
> behavior in browsers implementing an earlier snapshot of the parsing spec.

This only makes sense if we think complex ruby makes sense. If it does not,
then we should design the parser to be the best thing ignoring complex ruby.

I'm not at all convinced that the use cases for complex ruby are compelling.
Sure, as with anything, there are use cases that need finer-grained semantics
than HTML can provide. But we're not designing DocBook here, the rare use cases
are _by design_ not handled. We don't have a way to semantically mark up
Scandanavian arroword crosswords (or indeed even simpler "regular" crosswords),
and that's ok. We don't have a way to mark up bibliographic entries in a manner
sufficiently semantic-rich to work as well as BibTeX, and that's ok.

Note that I'm not arguing here that we shouldn't add this _yet_; that it might
make sense one day but not today. I'm arguing that it will never make sense for
HTML to support complex ruby, because the use cases of complex ruby are too
obscure to deserve being supported as first-class primitives in HTML.

Am I wrong?

If I _am_ wrong, what other features might we one day add that we should
support in the parser today? Crosswords in particular might need particularly
painful changes to the table parsing model; should we add new elements to table
parsing rules to support potential future extensions there?

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Received on Friday, 1 July 2011 22:20:56 UTC