[Web-SIG] HTML parsers and DOM; WWW::Mechanize work-alike

[Stuart Langridge]

Simon Willison spoo'd forth:
> Stuart Langridge wrote:
>> I don't see that tidy's ability to tidy HTML per se is useful, but I
>> think that it's very useful in that it can take invalid HTML and
>> convert it to valid XHTML. That way, we can get a DOM tree from invalid
>> HTML, which is very useful...
> 
> Is there any way we could get a DOM tree from invalid HTML using pure 
> Python tools? The HTML tools in the Python standard library at the 
> moment are all pure Python. Could we even use the existing sgmllib 
> module (or an extension of it) to create our own DOM tree from invalid HTML?

Presumably we could (the existing things, like HtmlLib or microdom do
it); I was just thinking of not having to implement it if we didn't have
to :)
I'm not all that hot on sgmllib, either -- parsing invalid HTML strikes
me as being pretty hard, since browsers have to try hard to do it. I
don't know, however, if the hard thing is *displaying* it right rather
than just *parsing* it.
Thought: Grail was a browser, so it might have done it?

sil

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