Re: I don't know shit about xml

[Adam Thompson <arthompson1990@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 08:32:37PM -0400, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> The scanners have huge overlap, and I expect only minor differences, so
> should keep it as one function. All the tag cracking and attribute cracking
> and &element; cracking and building the tree it's all the same. I suspect
> html came first and xml was a direct generalization, by throwing away the
> semantics. For sure one was very quickly on the heels of the other.

I appreciate I'm a little late to this discussion but I think (and some
quick research seems to confirm this) that they're both subsets of SGML. To
be more specific, XML is readable by a generic SGML parser whilst some SGML
(i.e. some HTML constructs) will generate errors in XML parsers. In
addition, as previously noted, XML has no inherent semantics whereas HTML
most definitely does.

To add some more confusion, an attempt was made to apply XML strictness to
HTML called as XHTML. This was, as far as I remember, the thing for a while
until HTML5 came along which (I think) went back to the pure SGML basis of
HTML.

Also, as previously noted, there's all the non-standard (and probably
incorrect in SGML though I've not bothered to read the generic standard)
garbage which people wrote (and continue to write) and browsers somehow turn
into something sane.

As such, I expect there to be quite a bit of overlap and the current
direction seems to make sense. In fact, there are other parsers which have
XML and HTML modes (and not just those used in browsers).

Cheers,
Adam.