[wp-hackers] Re: WordPress, web standards, and (X)HTML

[Elliotte Harold]

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> It cleans both HTML and XHTML, though neither massively well. I prefer
> what I've seen of xmllint, myself. But what would either system do when
> it encounters something it can't fix? And if fixes were applied
> aggressively, could authorial intention be compromised?

Authorial intent is a popular fallacy. All we have to go on is the text. 
We can't read the author's mind.

If the author had made their markup intent clear neither Tidy nor 
TagSoup will change it. However if the author has not made their intent 
clear, then Tidy and TagSoup will guess, just as browsers will. 
Sometimes the authors may agree with the guesses that the purifiers and 
the browsers make. Sometimes they won't. But there are guesses in this 
case no matter who makes them.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
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