On 12/16/13 5:29 PM, Hans-Juergen Rennau wrote:
> The expression-oriented thinking practised in XML technology stops
> abruptly at the border provided by XML syntax. Differences of encoding,
> quote character, use of entities, etc. are abstracted away and defined
> to be irrelevant to the information content - as long as the text in
> question is XML. But HTML is "something else", not XML. The standards
> will not allow to parse an HTML document into a node tree. The prevalent
> thinking seems to be that text resources defined to encode node trees
> must be XML text. Is there a good reason, apart from inertia of habit?
I'm not sure that border is particularly sharp, even with inertia of
habit. There was XHTML, and even with the (not my favorite) parsing
specified by HTML5, there's definitely a clear path to a node tree.
HTML folks rarely use XPath and XQuery, generally preferring CSS
selectors and JavaScript, but they certainly do work with node trees
when convenient. XML folks have been applying XPath and XQuery to HTML
for a long while now - as John Cowan's Tag Soup demonstrates, even to
HTML where such things are difficult.
There is also a growing, though I think unfortunate, school of web
application design that thinks of HTML as merely a serialization for the
underlying DOM created and manipulated through JavaScript.
Thanks,
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/
