[whatwg] We should not throw DOM Consistency and Infoset compatibility under the bus

[David Young]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:29:42PM +0200, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> I think it would be a mistake to change HTML in such a way that it
> would no longer fit into the XML data model *as implemented* and
> thereby limit the range of existing software that could be used
> outside browsers for working with HTML just because XML in browsers is
> no longer in vogue. Please, let's not make that mistake.

Strongly agree with Henri that XML tools provide a lot of leverage on
the web today, and you don't want to give that up.

I once wrote a primitive web crawler in shell using NetBSD's 'ftp'
utility for fetching web pages, Nhat Minh Lê's one-of-a-kind 'xmlgrep'
utility to extract hrefs, and 'tidy' to convert from HTML or dodgy
XHTML to well-formed XHTML.  It wasn't a very sophisticated or
full-featured crawler, but it was tiny, fast, transparent, easy to
extend, and it would have been impossible to whip up in a couple of
hours if I didn't have in my pocket an "XML multitool" that I could
apply easily to web pages.

It seems to me that app-specific annotations, such as you can add to
XHTML with XML namespaces, are valuable both on the server and on the
browser, where they are visible and usable by application JavaScript.

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung at pobox.com    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981