HTML 5 Parser Lands In Gecko
John Resig has blogged about HTML 5 parsing and the news that Henri Sivonen (the chap who did the HTML 5 validator) has landed a massive commit to the trunk of Firefox that includes an HTML 5 parser.
The method is quite interesting:
What’s interesting about this particular implementation is that it’s actually an automated conversion of Henri’s Java HTML 5 parser to C++. This conversion happens automatically and changes will be pushed upstream to the Mozilla codebase.
Normally I would balk at the mention of a wholesale, programmatic, conversion of a Java codebase over to C++ but the results have been very surprising: A 3% boost in pageload performance.
And this is on top of the litany of bug fixes and compliance checks that this code base will be providing. You can examine some of the progress that went into the constructing the patch in the Mozilla bug.
If you’re interested in giving the new parser a try (it’s doubtful that you’ll see many obvious changes – but any help in hunting down bugs would be appreciated) you can download a nightly of Firefox, open about:config, and set html5.enable to true.
For extra fun, throw in some inline SVG and see it just work! Bye bye namespaces!
Pithy HTML5/XHTML comments
Dan Morill (Android and formerly GWT fame and al-round good guy) had some funny remarks on the XHTML/HTML5 kerfuffle:
An exercise: I can easily summarize HTML5 in a single Tweet. I can’t think of a way to do that for XHTML. “HTML5 codifies existing behaviors and is a practitioner’s roadmap for the future of browser capabilities.”
This “death of XHTML” meme is awesome, it’s soooo easy to bust out with pithy zingers.
Here’s one: “The web *itself* is content soup, why should we expect HTML to be more than tag soup?”
Another: “XHTML was the Edsel of the web: painstakingly designed, proudly touted, and utterly missing the point.”
“They finally closed the tag on XHTML, and now the web is validated.”
