Re: Comments on HTML WG face to face meetings in France Oct 08

On Nov 17, 2008, at 17:50, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> I think it is (simply by virtue of being a state machine; it should  
> be possible to automatically verify that all transitions for all  
> inputs in all states are defined; once that's done, the spec is  
> certainly unambiguous).


Each state in both the tokenizer and all but three states of the the  
tree builder have an "Anything else" entry, and the three tree builder  
states are otherwise exhaustive even though the words "Anything else"  
don't appear.

As far as I can tell, the major source of ambiguity is the same one  
that causes a huge hole in XML's definition of well-formedness: If the  
input byte stream has an unusual character encoding, agents that  
support the encoding and agents that don't arrive at different DOMs.  
Plugging this hole would require specifying a fixed finite set of  
encodings that agents MUST support and specifying that agents MUST NOT  
support encoding from outside the set.

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

Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 16:18:52 UTC