On 4/11/11 10:03 AM, Yehuda Katz wrote:
It would be useful if there was a way to take a String of HTML and
parse it into a document fragment. This should work even if the HTML
string contains elements that are invalid in the "in body" insertion
mode.
Something like this code should work:
var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();
frag.innerHTML = "<tr><td>hello</td></tr>"
someTable.appendChild(frag)
At present, this can sometimes be achieved if the context of the HTML
string is known in advance. However, this is not always the case. For
instance, jQuery supplies an API that looks like this:
$("html string").appendTo("#table")
At the time that jQuery is creating the document fragment for the HTML
string, it does not yet know what its context will be. This approach
is used in order to enable convenient setup code. Here is a very
contrived example to illustrate the point:
var frag = $("html string")
// replace the HTML content of a descendent <span> with the contents
of its data-title attribute
frag.find("span[data-title]").html(function() { return
this.attr("data-title"); })
html.appendTo("#table")
In general, this makes it easier to build abstractions that work with
Strings of HTML, without always needing to make sure consumers of the
abstraction know and pass in the existing context.
This would probably require a new, laxer insertion mode, which would
behave similarly to the body insertion mode, but with different
semantics in the "/A start tag whose tag name is one of: "caption",
"col", "colgroup", "frame", "head", "tbody", "td", "tfoot", "th",
"thead", "tr""/ case. One way to handle those cases would be to
immediately enter an appropriate insertion mode if an unexpected tag
was found. For instance, if a start tr tag was encountered "at the
root", the parser could go into "in table" or "in table body"
insertion mode instead of treating it like a parse error and ignoring
the token.
It would also be great to have some notification of the parser error - a
console warning might be most appropriate. This would be a great aid
when debugging functions that generate html. This feature is probably up
to the browser vendors though.
Sean
