Archive for the ‘Processing Model’ Category
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.
- Fixed an issue where under rare circumstances attribute values were leaking into element content.
- Fixed a bug where
isindex processing added attributes to all elements that were supposed to have no attributes.
- Implemented spec changes. (Too numerous to enumerate, but, as a highlight, framesets parse much better now.)
- Moved to WebKit-style foster parenting.
- Changed the API for tree builder subclasses again due to new constraints. If you have previously written your own tree builder subclass, you need to change it.
- Fixed the bundled XML serializer.
- Made it possible to generate a C++ version that does not leak memory from the Java source.
- Removed the C++ translator from the release. (Get it from SVN.)
Posted in Processing Model, Syntax | Comments Off on Validator.nu HTML Parser 1.2.0
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 »
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:
- A link containing nothing but an image
- A group of images that form a single larger image
- An image not intended for the user (such as a "web bug" tracking image)
- 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:
- revision 1951: define
window.top
- revision 1956: "User agents must not run executable code embedded in the image resource."
- revision 1958: more notes on what is a valid image (a surprisingly difficult question)
- revision 1965: allow
<a> elements to straddle paragraphs
- revision 1998: define what happens when you set
onclick='' on a document outside a Window
- revision 1999: define
javascript: in Window-less environments
- revision 2001: define 'directionality' in terms of the
dir='' attribute for cases where the 'direction' property has no computed value
- revision 2002: define processing for the second argument to
getDataURL() for image/jpeg
- revision 2004: specify how to handle transparent images in the
toDataURL() method
- revision 2008: make patterns required in the
<canvas> API
- revision 2016: when
<script type=''> is given, it must match the type of the script, even if the script is Javascript
- revision 2019: remove
autosubmit='' from the <menu> element
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Processing Model, Weekly Review, WHATWG | 21 Comments »
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
There is now a new release of the Validator.nu HTML Parser. Change highlights:
- Adds optional support for heuristic encoding sniffing using the ICU4J sniffer, jchardet or both.
- Adds support for rewinding and reparsing when becoming confident about the character encoding and the tentative encoding was wrong.
- Performs encoding name matching per spec instead of using the JDK mechanism.
- Implements spec changes up until just before SVG and MathML support. (Those will merit 1.1 or something.)
- Warning: The semantics of the doctype token have changed in case you have your own token handler (unlikely).
Posted in Processing Model, Syntax | Comments Off on Validator.nu HTML Parser 1.0.7 Released
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Version 1.0.6 of the Validator.nu HTML Parser has been released. The new version fixes a crasher bug in bytes to characters conversion, works around a crash when the ICU4J 3.8.1 UTF-7 decoder is in the classpath, improves error message wording and brings errors and warnings pertaining to legacy encodings up-to-date per the current HTML 5 draft.
This update is highly recommended for all applications that use the parser by giving it an URI or an InputStream. For applications that give the parser a Reader the update is not necessary.
Posted in Processing Model, Syntax | Comments Off on Validator.nu HTML Parser 1.0.6 Released