HTML5 parsing rules analysis_html5 tutorial skills

Although some parts of HTML 5 are currently controversial, the parsing part is unanimously agreed upon by browser manufacturers. Once browsers start implementing it, users can benefit from the compatibility improvements it brings.

One of the first implementations of HTML 5 parsing rules was developed to support HTML 5 validators. (http://ejohn.org should be valid HTML 5 if you want to test this validator.) This implementation was developed in Java, provides interfaces to SAX and DOM, and is open source.

Interestingly, Henri Sivonen (the author of the validator) recently developed a new HTML 5 parsing engine for Gecko, which will be used in the next version of Firefox.

This implementation is actually accomplished by automatically converting Henri's Java implementation of the HTML 5 parser into C. This conversion is done automatically, and all changes are committed to the Mozilla code base.

Generally speaking, when it comes to large-scale programmatic conversion of Java code bases to C, I jump out. But the results are very unexpected: page loading performance increased by 3%.

These are based on a series of bug fixes and consistency checks that will be provided by the code base. You can check the patch's progress in Mozilla's bug repository.

If you want to try out the new parser (you're unlikely to find many noticeable changes, but any effort to find bugs is appreciated), download a daily build of Firefox and open it about:config, just set html5.enable to true.

If you want to upgrade to HTML 5, now is the time. Because HTML 5 is a superset of the features provided by HTML 4 and XHTML 1, upgrading is very easy. Just change the current (X)HTML document type declaration to the HTML 5 document type.



You can find details on how to make the new HTML 5 elements work in all browsers from the HTML 5 Doctor website.