[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: What is the rule for parsing XML in a namespace inside HTM
On Jul 12, 2004, at 9:56 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: > > Yeah, it's shows the narcissism of most developers. "Please rewrite > your page in some buzzword-compliant gobbledy-gook subset of XML that > is > less reliable and harder to test than what you were already doing, and > then I can theoretically write a screenscraper". > > The point about developers asking end users to make life easy for them is well taken. It's amazing how much ingenuity goes into doing useful things with tag soup and minimal metadata, but how much real benefit we get from all that lousy HTML via browsers, search engines, script applications, etc. But maybe it is more globally efficient to have a small group of developers learn how to make sense out of tag soup than to force the masses to deal with the very real pain of full standards compliance. [Browse the Atom mailing list archives if you disagree about the pain; the intersection of the appropriate HTTP, URI, MIME, HTML, and XML specs is a difficult target to hit once things get at all interesting.] Still, the point of XHTML is not so much to be a stopgap but to bring some rigor to content so that ALL SORTS of XML technology can be thrown at it. Screenscraping is just one use case, there's also querying, transformation, syndication, content re-use (without worrying about the HTML escaping hassles), web-services enablement ... for just about every XML infrastructure spec, there's a plausible scenario in which having Web content in XHTML enables all sorts of interesting things without relying on tidy or a tag soup parser to build a clean syntax or infoset. We're at an interesting juncture: The browser is being reinvigorated as a product and platform, and the importance of "standards" [in the broad sense, not the narrow sense of conformance to RFC's and Recommendations] is becoming obvious. At the same time, it is becoming unpleasantly apparent that some Recommendations such as Namespaces and XHTML have run into a lot of resistance in the real world. I'd like to see some real give and take -- "refactoring" if you will -- to realign the Recommendations with end-user reality and to re-synch the end-users with the vision enabled by standardization.
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