Fwd: Re: [Web-SIG] Client-side support: what are we aiming for?

David Fraser davidf at sjsoft.com
Fri Oct 24 03:55:46 EDT 2003


Thijs van der Vossen wrote:

>>As for forms, originally I thought the forms code I wrote (ClientForm --
>>again, based on a port of Gisle Aas' libwww-perl, and again quite
>>substantially changed since then) might be nice in the std lib, but I
>>changed my mind a long while ago for a number of reasons.  But if anybody
>>wants to talk about HTML form parsers, of course, feel free to start a
>>thread.  Same goes for HTML table parsing -- I'm not convinced the
>>standard library is the place for this.
>>    
>>
>I tend to agree with this. HTML form and/or table parsing is almost only used
>for stuff like screen-scraping, but I don't think this is so common it should
>be included in the stanstard library. Retrieving data from the web will be
>done more and more through web service interfaces like XML-RPC and SOAP or
>with REST-style interfaces.
>  
>
Actually HTML parsing would be fantastic for testing web applications, 
so maybe that could be related to the Web API.
The parsing doesn't have to be very intelligent or do validation, HTML 
syntax is fairly simple.
I think that does belong in the standard library.

David




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