Re: First draft of work published which removes the dependency on HTML::Parser from HTTP::Message

* Mark Stosberg wrote:
>On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 22:05:27 +0100
>Gisle Aas <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#determining-the-character-encoding
>> specifies how to pre-scan an HTML document to sniff the charset.
>> Would it not be simpler to just implement the algorithm as specified
>> instead of using a generic parser.  The use of HTML::Parser to
>> implement this sniffing was just me trying a shortcut since
>> HTML::Parser seemed to implement a superset of these rules.
>
>Those rules look somewhat involved to me, especially knowing that we already
>have both XS and Pure Perl parsers at hand. 
>
>Two thoughts:
>
>1. What about using HTML::Encoding, after adapting it so it has only
>conditional dependency on HTML::Parser, and only uses HTML::Parser if available. 
>(It already tries several detection methods before getting to HTML::Parser):
>
>http://search.cpan.org/~bjoern/HTML-Encoding/
>
>A variation on this idea would for *it* to a pure Perl HTML parser
>instead of skipping the HTML parsing check completely. 

Here via https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=66313 (well I am on
the list anyway but didn't see this apparently), I note that I would've
no problem using a different module to parse the document for character
encoding meta elements (the code wrapping HTML::Parser is very simple,
so this should not be too hard, but I am not up to date with what alter-
natives are available). Also, if someone made a pure Perl implementation
of the algorithm noted above in a manner that would fit easily with my
module, I'd be happy to use that instead aswell (although I doubt the
proposal there captures reality very well, but I have not kept track of
the latest developments there either).

I'd also be quite happy to invite a co-maintainer on board, I mostly
wrote the module for the W3C Markup Validator (where it is still in use)
and for some simple scraping stuff, so my interest in it is somewhat
limited these days, but I am happy to do some easy fixes anyway.

Any thoughts on this?
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