Archive for the ‘Processing Model’ Category

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Help Test HTML5 Parsing in Gecko

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

The HTML5 parsing algorithm is meant to demystify HTML parsing and make it uniform across implementations in a backwards-compatible way. The algorithm has had “in the lab” testing, but so far it hasn’t been tested inside a browser by a large number of people. You can help change that now!

A while ago, an implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm landed on mozilla-central preffed off. Anyone who is testing Firefox nightly builds can now opt to turn on the HTML5 parser and test it.

How to Participate?

First, this isn’t release-quality software. Testing the HTML5 parser carries all the same risks as testing a nightly build in general, and then some. It may crash, it may corrupt your Firefox profile, etc. If you aren’t comfortable with taking the risks associated with running nighly builds, you shouldn’t participate.

If you are still comfortable with testing, download a trunk nightly build, run it, navigate to about:config and flip the preference named html5.enable to true. This makes Gecko use the HTML5 parser when loading pages into the content area and when setting innerHTML. The HTML5 parser is not used for HTML embedded in feeds, Netscape bookmark import, View Source, etc., yet.

The html5.enable preference doesn’t require a restart to take effect. It takes effect the next time you load a page.

What to Test?

The main thing is getting the HTML5 parser exposed to a wide range of real Web content that people browse. This may turn up crashes or compatibility problems.

So the way to help is to use nightly builds with the HTML5 parser for browsing as usual. If you see no difference, things are going well! If you see a page misbehaving—or, worse, crashing—with the HTML5 parser turned on but not with it turned off, please report the problem.

Reporting Bugs

Please file bugs in the “Core” product under “HTML: Parser” component with “[HTML5] ” at the start of the summary.

Known Problems

First and foremost, please refer to the list of known bugs.

However, I’d like to highlight a particular issue: Support for comments ending with --!> is in the spec, but the patch hasn’t landed, yet. Support for similar endings of pseudo-comment escapes within script element content is not in the spec yet. The practical effect is that the rest of the page may end up being swallowed up inside a comment or a script element.

Another issue is that the new parser doesn’t yet inhibit document.write() in places where it shouldn’t be allowed per spec but where the old parser allowed it.

Is There Anything New?

So what’s fun if success is that you notice no change? There are important technical things under the hood—like TCP packet boundaries not affecting the parse result and there never being unnotified nodes in the tree when the event loop spins—but you aren’t supposed to notice.

However, there is a major new visible feature, too. With the HTML5 parser, you can use SVG and MathML in text/html pages. This means that you can:

And yes, you can even put SVG inside MathML <annotation-xml> or MathML inside <foreignObject>. The mixing you’ve seen in XML is now supported in HTML, too.

If you aren’t concerned with taking the steps to make things degrade nicely in browsers that don’t support SVG and MathML in HTML, you can simply copy and paste XML output from your favorite SVG or MathML editor into your HTML source as long as the editor doesn’t use namespace prefixes for elements and uses the prefix xlink for XLink attributes.

If you don’t use the XML empty element syntax and you put you SVG text nodes in CDATA sections, the page will degrade gracefully in older HTML browser so that the image simply disappears but the rest of the page is intact. You can even put a fallback bitmap as <img> inside <desc>. Unfortunately, there isn’t a similar technique for MathML, though if you want to develop one, I suggest experimenting with the <annotation> as your <desc>-like container.

There are known issues with matching camelCase names with Selectors or getElementByTagName, though.

Posted in Browsers, Processing Model, Syntax | 8 Comments »

Validator.nu HTML Parser 1.2.1

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Version 1.2.1 of the Validator.nu HTML Parser is now available. It fixes an incompatibility with the DOM implementation of the latest Xerces.

Posted in DOM, Processing Model, Syntax | No Comments »

Validator.nu HTML Parser 1.2.0

Friday, March 27th, 2009

I put together a new release of the Validator.nu HTML Parser. This is a highly recommended update for everyone who is using a previous version the parser in an application.

Posted in Processing Model, Syntax | No Comments »

2022

Friday, September 12th, 2008

There has been a certain amount of controversy over the supposed date of 2022 for HTML 5 to be "finished". It is somewhat important to realise the significance that should be attached to this date:

None at all

OK, strictly speaking that's not quite true, but it's a pretty good approximation to the truth. What really matters is when browsers ship HTML5 features. Given that's already happening, there is really no cause for alarm. By 2022 we hope to have a full testsuite and two full implementations but then we also expect to see products shipping with features from HTML 6.

Posted in Processing Model, WHATWG | 4 Comments »

This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 1

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Welcome to a new semi-regular column, "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.

The biggest news is the birth of the Web Workers draft specification. Quoting the spec, "This specification defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism." This is the standardization of the API that Google Gears pioneered last year. See also: initial Workers thread, announcement of new spec, response to Workers feedback.

Also notable this week: even more additions to the Requirements for providing text to act as an alternative for images. 4 new cases were added:

  1. A link containing nothing but an image
  2. A group of images that form a single larger image
  3. An image not intended for the user (such as a "web bug" tracking image)
  4. Text that has been rendered to a graphic for typographical effect

Additionally, the spec now tries to define what authors should do if they know they have an image but don't know what it is. Quoting again from the spec:

If the src attribute is set and the alt attribute is set to a string whose first character is a U+007B LEFT CURLY BRACKET character ({) and whose last character is a U+007D RIGHT CURLY BRACKET character (}), the image is a key part of the content, and there is no textual equivalent of the image available. The string consisting of all the characters between the first and the last character of the value of the alt attribute gives the kind of image (e.g. photo, diagram, user-uploaded image). If that value is the empty string (i.e. the attribute is just "{}"), then even the kind of image being shown is not known.

  • If the image is available, the element represents the image specified by the src attribute.
  • If the image is not available or if the user agent is not configured to display the image, then the user agent should display some sort of indicator that the image is not being rendered, and, if possible, provide to the user the information regarding the kind of image that is (as derived from the alt attribute).

See also: revision 1972, revision 1976, revision 1978, revision 1979, Images and alternate text.

Other interesting changes this week:

Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."

Posted in Processing Model, Weekly Review, WHATWG | 21 Comments »

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