[whatwg] HTML5 Parsing spec first draft ready

Dan Brickley danbri at danbri.org
Wed Feb 15 14:56:23 PST 2006


+cc: Dan Connolly

* Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> [2006-02-14 18:41+0000]
> On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Dan Brickley wrote:
> > 
> > Any plans for a test suite? eg. pairs of input files and normalised 
> > output? (if that makes sense...).
> 
> I'd strongly recommend people put off creating a test suite until the spec 
> is in more than a "first draft", but yes, on the long term this is 
> something we should definitely do.

Yup, I appreciate it's early days.

Discussing some related work (GRDDL) in the W3C SemWeb CG, I was
wondering whether there is any way your parser spec could be 
specified as input for a GRDDL transform. GRDDL provides techniques for
transforming XML-based languages (including XHTML) into an RDF
representation; typically by reference to an XSLT. If the WHATWG 
parser spec defined itself in terms of some XML-shaped output, the two
should chain nicely together. Have you considered defining the parser
behaviour in terms of XML concepts? If you do get to the test suite
stage, there'll be need for some concrete syntax presumably, to express
test outputs in? GRDDL could then say "for HTML-ish bytestreams, 
feed them to the WHATWG algorithm to get XML, and feed that XML to 
normal GRDDL algorithm to get RDF"... 

Dan



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