[whatwg] Another issue in 12.2.5.5 parsing tokens in foreign content

Michael Day mikeday at yeslogic.com
Wed Jul 3 17:34:34 PDT 2013


Hi Ian,

> We don't have any data that says that we need to support this for
> innerHTML. I think it's a win if we can drop the hack from innerHTML.

Okay, so allowing some HTML elements to break out of foreign content is 
a hack added for historical reasons, that will surprise authors and 
complicate implementations and is thus regrettable, but necessary.

Then there are two possibilities for fragment parsing:

(1) The hack can be left out of fragment parsing, as there is no 
historical justification for it. Since the hack is bad, removing it from 
as many situations as possible is good.

(2) The hack can apply to fragment parsing in the same way as it applies 
to regular parsing. This makes parsing behaviour more consistent across 
different situations, which is good.

I'm strongly in favour of (2), as it seems that omitting the hack from 
some rare situations doesn't save authors any trouble, and doesn't 
follow the principle of least surprise.

In an ideal world it would be possible to grab any subsection of a 
document, parse that in isolation as a fragment, and get the same result 
as if it was parsed in its original document context. This is possible 
in XML, but not HTML, due to the existing "author-friendly" hacks, and 
making the parsing behaviour even more context sensitive doesn't seem 
like a good thing.

Best regards,

Michael

-- 
Prince: Print with CSS!
http://www.princexml.com



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