On 08.06.2012, 23:25 Derk-Jan wrote:
I think we should strive to leave HTML transformation behind - for non-WAP devices we could rely on CSS only. DOM parsing made a lot of sense at the time of the Ruby gateway which had to parse HTML for screen-scraping anyway. However, now by avoiding HTML parsing we could:
- Avoid performance reduction for mobile requests
- Make out output more uniform
- Stop relying on that unsalvageable piece of crap called libxml
For specific cases when there's a lot of desktop HTML that doesn't need to be shown to mobile users at all, we could tweak the parser to ouptut mobile-specific HTML, but this should be restricted to minimum.
As much as I would love to have it that way, reality in mobile apps and web apps over the past 3 years have shown me that only works for Android and iOS. Any older feature phones are, in terms of HTML parsing capability, hardly better than the old WAP phones. HTML5 and XHTML 1.0 don't mix very well in the real world.
Well, we already serve either WML or HTML5, no middle ground :)