Re: An HTML language specification

On Nov 21, 2008, at 10:04, Rob Sayre wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I agree that pagination is not the issue. I don't think the scare  
> quote is appropriate, and I disagree that such a separation is of no  
> benefit to implementors, since I would have been glad to get such  
> guidance for Mozilla work in the past.

I've found the spec as written suitable for implementing a parser core  
that suits both non-scripted non-browsers and scripted browsers and  
for implementing IO drivers for both cases. (Well, the IO driver for  
the browser case doesn't run yet, so there's still opportunity to hit  
a problem.)

How would Mozilla work have benefited from the parsing algorithm being  
in a different document?

What the spec doesn't say is how to sanitize HTML so that the parser  
output can be inserted safely into a different-origin DOM that as a  
whole has script execution enabled. This issue is orthogonal to  
splitting the parsing algorithm into a different document.

Should the HTML5 spec specify how to sanitize HTML as it appears in  
RSS or Atom feeds for insertion into a different-origin DOM?

>>  ... It's not horribly intertwined but there are some  
>> dependencies ...
> I agree. That's why I don't think splitting parsing *and* vocabulary  
> into a separate document is unreasonable on its face.

I don't find it unreasonable on its face. (For MathML and SVG  
elements, text/html parsing and the vocabulary are already in separate  
documents.) However, I think here we should allow the person who does  
the work use the spec organization that suits his work pattern,  
because having the parsing and vocabulary in the same document isn't  
unreasonable on its face, either.

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

Received on Friday, 21 November 2008 08:51:35 UTC