- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:21:17 +0000 (UTC)
On Mon, 12 Mar 2007, olivier Thereaux wrote: > > Did you have a chance to look at engines in authoring tools? What type of > parser do NVU Gecko, same as Firefox. > Amaya, Amaya's editor uses the same rendering engine as Amaya's browser, which I presume was ignored due to its negligible market share. > golive etc work on? Golive uses Opera's rendering engine. > How about parsing engines for search engine robots? These are probably > as important, if not more as some of the browser engines in defining the > "generic" engine for the web today. Search engine companies are notoriously secretive about what their indexing pipelines support, since any insight into how they work can be abused by people attempting to game their ranking algorithms. The WHATWG specification (in particular the parsing part, but other parts as well) has, however, been influenced by what information search engine implementors have confidentially contacted me with, and what suggestions they have anonymously or subtly sent to the list over the years. (This is why a careful study of the specification's acknowledgements will reveal employees from several search engine implementors.) In any case, reverse engineering search engine indexing pipelines is extremely difficult and tedious, orders of magnitude more so than even browsers. Why do you think search engine behaviour is more important than browser engine behaviour? For what it's worth, search engine engineers I have spoken to have told me that what browsers do is far more important than what a particular version of a search engine does in terms of what the specification should say, because their results are better when their algorithms match the browsers' behaviours. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 12 March 2007 00:21:17 UTC