From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-12-18T01:55:26+09:00
Subject: Re: hpricot problem

> I have found that saved pages from Firefox are different then the html
> hpricot uses.

Of course they are. If you save a page from Firefox, (or IE, or just any
browser) the page gets saved as-it-is (i.e. as the author put it on the
web server - with all the errors, non-conforming, unclosed or otherwise
malformed tags, etc.)

Now, what happens when a browser renders the page? It builds a Document
Object Model (DOM) out of the HTML and renders the DOM. This DOM
conforms to strict rules (i.e. no wild-wild-west HTML crapfest). If  you
would dump it to a file as an XML, you would have a correct XHTML page,
which would resemble to the original HTML as much as the browser's DOM
building rules make this possible (generally very close to standards in
the case of Mozilla and Opera, crappy in the case of IE (at least before
6, I am not sure about 7)).

What Hpricot does is very similar: It builds a DOM of the HTML. (I am
not sure if _why calls this a DOM or whatever, but it is an internal
representation of the underlying HTML). Of course Mozilla DOM != HPricot
 DOM (!= IE DOM != Opera DOM et cetera) therefore you can't make
assumptions about what does Hpricot do based on what does Mozilla do.

If you want Mozilla to parse your page and return the DOM (or serialize
it to XML so you can feed it to an XML/XSLT/XPath engine), I can show
you how, but only in Java - unfortunately Ruby's tools are not yet there.

Or, you can use Hpricot and forget about how it works in everywhere else...


Cheers
Peter

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