Re: [xml] Cleaning the Web - Implementing HTML 5 parsing in libxml2

[Andi Sidwell <andi takkaria org>]

Stefan Behnel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Karl Dubost wrote:
> >    Nick Kew weighed in and proposed that we should target [6]libxml
> >    which includes an HTML parser and is already supported by Apache
> >    server and many other tools.
> >
> >       [6] http://xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-HTMLparser.html
> >
> >    From here it would be interesting to implement HTML 5 parsing
> >    algorithm into libxml2. It would benefit the community as large.
>
> Have you tried joining forces with the people who started the C implementation
> of html5lib? Maybe they have ideas to contribute or (partially) working code
> that you can look at. It may even happen that you get them convinced of the
> project.
>
> In any case, having working implementations in Python and Java should get you
> a lot closer to your goal by looking under the hood.

FWIW, I've spent the summer working on a C HTML5 parser which is
approaching stability, called Hubbub[1].  It's about as half as fast as
libxml2 at parsing the HTML 5 spec with an O(1) treebuilder, and it's
fairly easy to bind to the libxml2 interfaces (and is being used in lieu
of the libxml2 HTML parser in a small Web browser, NetSurf[2], in the
development branch).  Note it's a) not buildable as a shared library or
b) had a formal release, but if someone wants an HTML5 parser in C, then
it's probably not a bad bet.

[1] http://www.netsurf-browser.org/projects/hubbub/
[2] http://www.netsurf-browser.org/