Re: An HTML language specification

Rob Sayre wrote:
>
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> How would Mozilla work have benefited from the parsing algorithm 
>> being in a different document?
>
> I was thinking of the frequent request for DOMParser to handle 
> text/html. For this use, you probably don't want scripts executing, 
> but you probably don't want <noscript> parsing either. This desired 
> tree output is similar to server side uses I've observed.

That sounds like a use case that may not be adequately addressed but I'm 
not sure why that's related to the way the spec is organized.

> The Mozilla work would have benefited from a clear, complete, and 
> finished document on HTML parsing and tokenization. I don't see why 
> this document needs to be tied to a SQL API.

I don't understand how that is practically different to what is 
available at the moment. My impression -- confirmed by the marker in the 
spec -- is that the parsing work is stable to the extent that it can be 
without having implementations in major-marketshare browsers. Clearly 
these will be needed to remove unforeseen web incompatibility from the 
current algorithm. Does it really make a difference from your point of 
view as a potential implementor whether the parsing section is in a 
document that is formally marked Last Call (but likely with some 
references to other documents that are not) or a section informally 
marked Last Call in a larger document of varying states of completeness?

Received on Friday, 21 November 2008 09:39:26 UTC