[uf-discuss] uF dumped in tag soup?

[David Thompson]

Joe Andrieu wrote:
> I believe that the problem is that more than a few of the parsers use XSLT operating on the file itself, rather than a DOM. Relying
> on a browser to parse the (X)HTML into a DOM is convenient, but it is also expensive architecturally, especially when doing
> server-side processing that may not have a browser in process.  XSLT is relatively fast and lightweight, if you have valid XML as
> input and it is notoriously unforgiving.
> 
> So, I believe that valid HTML that is not valid XHTML is non-compliant with uF. I expect that some of the tools work if the uF
> sections are XML compliant despite errors elsewhere, but I can't be certain of that.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, but isn't this approach contrary to the 
point of Microformats (namely, to make data easy to publish on the web)? 
Given that an overwhelming proportion of the pages around on the web are 
either served up as HTML (valid or otherwise) or invalid XHTML, 
restricting Microformats to those pages which are valid XHTML for the 
sake of easy parsing (as an XSLT-only parser surely would) seems to 
directly contravene the "humans first, machines second" principle.

-- 
David Thompson