Re: Web browser in Ada

["Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com>]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> What is an HTML 5 parser supposed to be?
> 
> If it is to parse the SGML text defined by the HTML 5 grammar
> then you would, in effect, have to copy browsers' near natural language
> processing capabilities, since having only an SGML parser with little
> more than moderate error correction capabilities is by far not enough
> for HTML.
> 
> Some browsers have a parser switch, IIRC. Switch to best effort
> mode for the important, but junk, HTML code that is out there,
> inevitably, new or old. Or be more optimistic and
> make an attempt at treating input text as if is was well formed
> XML text.

HTML 5 is intended to address (fix) the current horrible mess by specifying in
a reasonably precise way exactly how erroneous documents are to be handled.
That is, all HTML 5 implementations should handle bad documents in a similar
manner. Note that HTML 5 is *not* an SGML markup... nor is it intended to be.

A fully functioning web browser in today's world needs to handle "tag soup"
documents. Maybe someday that will no longer be necessary. Still... a clean
room implementation of HTML 5, in Ada, might be a nice contribution to the
cause of creating a better web browser.

I wonder if there are any easily identifyable security critical components
that could benefit from SPARK.

Peter