Re: [RFC] Decoding HTML and the Ambiguous Ampersand

On 23.08.2024 at 01:02, Dennis Snell wrote: >> If we could have a single implementation, that would be great. I do understand of course >> your concern that DOM is not a required extension, and therefore basing the internals on Lexbor >> makes it tied to the DOM extension which may not be available. I however suspect that a large chunk >> of people needing a function like this have DOM available (as DOM is required by many >> HTML-processing-related packages). I can also look into it sometime soon if you want; anyway feel >> free to ping me. > > I’m also very open to lexbor-based approaches but I’ve so-far found it more complicated > than I expected. In some part this is because it involves setting up the parser and state machine > for the HTML specification and much of the actual decoding can be safely done without this. > > The other part is the extension aspect. I hear you, that you would expect calling code to have > the DOM extensions available, but that’s simply not the case when developing a platform like > WordPress, which I do. We don’t have control over the servers or environments where people are > deploying this, and the availability of the DOM extensions is low enough that WordPress code simply > cannot use DOMDocument (even though it shouldn’t because of the > wild problems that has for attempting to parse HTML). > > People resort to html_entity_decode() because that’s the only > option. In WordPress we now have a spec-compliant decoder, but as it’s in user-space PHP its > performance is far below what’s possible. > > I’d love your help in setting up lexbor’s state machine to decode text nodes. I’d love it > even more if this could be part of the PHP language. It constantly surprises me that _the language > of the web_ (PHP) doesn’t have the tools to speak _the language of the web_ (HTML). This RFC is > all about taking a step towards ensuring that PHP developers can rely on PHP to be a reliable > middle-man between the HTML domain and the PHP domain. > > In other words, requiring the DOM extension or DOM\HtmlDocument > would be such a non-starter for WordPress (accounting for 43% of the web today) that it would > completely unavailable. Well, I don't think it would be a big deal to move the bundled lexbor to somewhere where it is always available. I mean, so far it's only used by ext/dom so it's bundled there, but if other parts of the php-src code base would use it, we could put it elsewhere. Christoph