Re: new TAG issue TagSoupIntegration-54

Bjoern made a point important in his mail, and I think the thread  
here will be flawed if we are not careful about it.


Le 26 oct. 2006 à 14:41, L. David Baron a écrit :
> Well, it's not exactly that there was anything to tackle.  HTML
> parsers have been pretty error-tolerant for a long time, since there
> are lots of errors in HTML on the Web.

- What is an HTML parser?
- Where are defined the rules of HTML parsing?
   Here everyone of the WHAT WG will jump on Web Apps 1.0 definition…
    http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#parsing

   Though I doubt that any libraries have been checked for this.
   http://www.alltheweb.com/search?q=%22HTML%20parser%22
   http://www.google.com/search?q=%22HTML+parser%22
   http://www.altavista.com/web/results?&q=%22HTML%20parser%22

- Where is the Test suite for it?
- Where is the interoperability report?

Unfortunately, at the time of HTML 4.01 publication, the quality  
process for checking implementation was not as developed as now.  
There is improvement, and I guess, there will be improvement for  
future development in this area.
   http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/HTML401/current/ (incomplete Test  
suite)

> Error handling was already consistent-enough across browsers on at  
> least most of the errors caused by sending XML as text/html.

- How do you prove the consistency here?
- Is there an implementation report for it?
- Consistency "Across browsers", which browsers?
   http://www.browserlist.browser.org/browser-list.shtml
   http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/design/browsers_list.php3
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers
   plus all the parsing libraries, bots indexing content on the Web,  
etc.

> So the browsers mostly haven't changed to handle XML sent as
> text/html.  They just use the same error correction that they've
> been using for years, although perhaps with a few tweaks so that the
> particular types of errors caused by sending XML are handled more
> consistently between browsers.

The answer consists exactly in the same generalization which is  
reproached to the TAG document. If we want to analyze and do not  
loose time on argueing how to handle this or that. We have to clarify  
first a lot of technical issues based on *facts* and *data*. Not  
generalization.




-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2006 06:58:52 UTC