[webcomponents] HTML Parsing and the <template> element
Dimitri Glazkov <dglazkov <at> chromium.org>
2012-02-08 22:00:03 GMT
Hello folks!
You may be familiar with the work around the <template> element, or a
way to declare document fragments in HTML (see
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-November/033868.html
for some background).
In trying to understand how this newfangled beast would work, I
started researching HTML parsing, and--oh boy was I ever sorry! Err..
I mean.. --and investigating how the contents of the <template>
element could be parsed.
So far, I have two ideas. Both introduce changes to HTML parsing
algorithm. Both have flaws, and I thought the best thing to do would
be to share the data with the experts and seek their opinions. Those
of you cc'd -- you're the designated experts :)
== IDEA 1: Keep template contents parsing in the tokenizer ==
PRO: if we could come up with a way to perceive the stuff between
<template> and </template> as a character stream, we enable a set of
use cases where the template contents does not need to be a complete
HTML subtree. For example, I could define a template that sets up a
start of a table, then a few that provide repetition patterns for
rows/cells, and then one to close out a table:
<template id="head"><table><caption>Nyan-nyan</caption><thead> ...
<tbody></template>
<template id="row"><tr><template><td> ... </td></template></tr></template>
<template id="foot"></tbody></table></template>
Then I could slam these templates together with some API and produce
an arbitrary set of tables.
PRO: Since the template contents are parsed as string, we create
opportunities for performance optimizations at the UA level. If a
bunch of templates is declared, but only a handful is used, we could
parse template contents on demand, thus reducing the churn of DOM
elements.
CON: Tokenizer needs to be really smart and will start looking a lot
like a specialized parser. At first glance, <template> behaves much
like a <textarea> -- any tags inside will just be treated as
characters. It works until you realize that templates sometimes need
to be nested. Any use case that involves building a
larger-than-one-dimensional data representation (like tables) will
involve nested templates. This makes things rather tricky. I made an
attempt of sketching this out here:
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/a28e16cc4167/spec/templates/index.html#parsing.
As you can see, this adds a largish set of new states to tokenizer.
And it is still incomplete, breaking in cases like
<template><script>alert('<template> is
awesome!');</script></template>.
It could be argued that--while pursuing the tokenizer algorithm
perfection--we could just stop at some point of complexity and issue a
stern warning for developers to not get too crazy, because stuff will
break -- akin to including "</script>" string in your Javascript code.
== IDEA 2: Just tweak insertion modes ==
PRO: It's a lot less intrusive to the parser -- just adjust insertion
modes to allow <template> tags in places where they would ordinary be
ignored or foster-parented, and add a new insertion for template
contents to let all tags in. I made a quick sketch here:
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/c96f051ca008/spec/templates/index.html#parsing
(Note: more massaging is needed to make it really work)
CON: You can't address fun partial-tree scenarios.
Which idea appeals to you? Perhaps you have better ideas? Please share.
:DG<
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