[whatwg] HTML5 Parsing spec first draft ready

Mon Feb 13 14:07:03 PST 2006

So...

The first draft of the HTML5 Parsing spec is ready.

I plan to start implementing it at some point in the next few months, to 
see how well it fares.

It is, in theory, more compatible with IE than Safari, Mozilla, and Opera, 
but there are places where it makes intentional deviations (e.g. the 
comment parsing, and it doesn't allow <object> in the <head> -- browsers 
are inconsistent about this at the moment, and we're dropping declare="" 
in HTML5 anyway so it isn't needed anymore; I plan to look for data on how 
common this is in the Web at some point in the future to see if it's ok 
for us to do this).

It's not 100% complete. Some of the things that need work are:

   Interaction with document.open/write/close is undefined
   How to determine the character encoding
   Integration with quirks mode problems
   <style> parsing needs tweaking if we want to exactly match IE
   <base> parsing needs tweaking to handle multiple <base>s
   <isindex> needs some prose in the form submission section
   No-frames and no-script modes aren't yet defined
   Execution of <script> is not yet defined
   New HTML5 elements aren't yet defined
   There are various cases (marked) where EOF handling is undefined
   Interaction with the "load" event is undefined

However, none of the above are particularly critical to the parsing.

If you have any comments, please send them. This part of the spec should 
be relatively stable now, so now is a good time to review it if you want 
to. And if anyone wants to implement it to test it against the real live 
Web content out there, that's encouraged too. :-)

The more evidence we have that this parsing model is solid and works with 
the real Web, the more likely we are to be able to convince Apple/Safari/ 
Mozilla to implement it. And if all the browsers implement the same 
parsing model, then HTML interoperability on the Web will take a huge leap 
forward. T'would be save everyone a lot of time.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'