[whatwg] HTML5 Parsing spec first draft ready

[Dan Brickley]

* Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> [2006-02-15 23:02+0000]
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Dan Brickley wrote:
> >
> > Have you considered defining the parser behaviour in terms of XML 
> > concepts?
> 
> What would that mean?
> 
> Could you give an example of what that would look like?

Expressing things in terms of DOM would be one way, assuming 
there is a mapping to XML infoset from the DOM (which 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407/ suggests
there is, though perhaps there are DOM version issues here?).
 
> > If you do get to the test suite stage, there'll be need for some 
> > concrete syntax presumably, to express test outputs in?
> 
> The output of the parser is a DOM, so the natural form to use as an output 
> concrete syntax is simply a serialised DOM (e.g. an XML file).

If your DOM comes with a standard XMLization, we're golden. Sorry I'm 
not so up to date on DOM stuff (eg. which DOMs have an XMLization
defined, etc.).

> 
> > 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"...
> 
> I'm with you up to the step where the output is XML, but I fail to see how 
> the next step is something WHATWG would be interested in. Could you expand 
> on this?

The next step is for people who find value in RDF's abstract graph structure
but find the standard RDF/XML syntax unattractive. GRDDL lets folk
deploy using XML or XHTML-based formats of their own devising, but 
map into RDF using XSLT so that RDF tools (eg. databases, SPARQL
query engines) can consume and exploit the data. I don't expect this
to be directly of interest to WHATWG unless WHATWG find value in RDF.
Beyond that, just think of it as another potential user of the parser
spec. http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/grddl-xml-demo has some demos
of GRDDL in action; http://librdf.org/query has some demos of RDF
query using SPARQL, from a toolkit that has GRDDL support. So one 
use case would be to mix natively RDF content with RDFized microformat
markup, so we could write queries whose answers draw on information
scattered across both formats and potentially multiple documents.

Dan



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