- From: Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 06:30:15 -0500
Henri Sivonen wrote: >> Are you saying that you don't believe the ecosystems around those languages to be capable of producing HTML5 parser libraries or are you saying that programmers wouldn't use the libraries even if the ecosystems produced them? The biggest problem (80%) is they won't use them unless they are called out by the specification because a.) they don't know they exist, b.) they don't know which one to choose, c.) programmers want to write them theirselves, d.) they have a policy of not using external code, or e.) they have a policy not to use anything but commerical code and they haven't approved budget for it. I *know* this to be true from my 12 years running the component reseller VBxtras/Xtras.Net and studying my customers use of components, both commercial and open-source. (Note if they were part of the spec then "d." and "e." wouldn't be an issue.) The lesser problems (20%) are that it will take time for reasonably good ones to evolve, and many will be subtly incompatible because of a variety of reasons: a.) lack of complete understand of the spec, b.) time-to-market concerns, c.) belief that full compatibility is not worth the expense, and/or d.) poor programmer skillls. It's my opinion that the spec needs to be the catalyst for people using these HTML5 parser libraries because sa I understand it achievement of many of the HTML5 goals is predicated on people moving to HTML5 parsers. >> That's a problem with C-based libraries for dynamic >> languages--not as much pure-dynamic language >> implementations, whose status is comparable to the >> application code. True, but on Windows servers you can't write ISAPI without C++, and Windows will continue to be a large market. In other cases, pure-dynamic language implementations are too slow to be viable. Put references to implementations in the spec, and the web hosts will use it. -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/ http://www.welldesignedurls.org/
Received on Tuesday, 5 December 2006 03:30:15 UTC