Re: An HTML language specification

On Nov 21, 2008, at 04:11, Rob Sayre wrote:

> I think some people are asking for a separate spec that would govern  
> the behavior of software similar to html5lib.
>
> http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/

The relevant sections are already available as separate HTML files:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/parsing.html
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tokenization.html
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tree-construction.html

I think the discussion of whether these three HTML files should be be  
in a separate "spec" is mostly about organizational aesthetics--it's  
not about the implementability, and it's not about getting the  
relevant text as separately addressable Web resources.

> This software does not implement Window or navigation, but it  
> appears to perform a useful task. It seems to me that either the  
> tree built by html5lib is a total sham, or the HTML5 spec is not as  
> intertwined as some are claiming.


The intertwinedness comes from script execution, from the offline app  
cache and from changing encodings by navigating the browsing context.  
It's not horribly intertwined but there are some dependencies that  
aren't applicable to deploying an HTML parser in an non-browser, non- 
scriptable agent.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 21 November 2008 06:53:48 UTC