Table of Contents

Chapter 3. The HTML parser

A diagram of an imaginary complex state machine.

Overview of the HTML parser

The HTML parser consists of two major components, the tokenizer and the tree builder, which are both state machines.

In the typical case, the input for the HTML parser comes from the network. However, it can also come from script with the document.write() API, which complicates the model. This is discussed in the document.write() section of Chapter 4. Scripting complications.

In the typical case, parsing a document goes through these stages:

Network ⇒ Byte Stream Decoder ⇒ Input Stream Preprocessor ⇒ Tokenizer ⇒ Tree builder ⇒ DOM

For example, consider the following document:

<!doctype html><p>Hello world.

Bytes go over the network and a decoder will produce a stream of code points (the details of how that works is a topic of another book). The tokenizer walks through the stream of code points, character by character, and emits tokens; in this case: a doctype token, a start tag token (p), and a series of character tokens (one token per character, although implementations can optimize by combining character tokens, if the end result is equivalent). The tree builder takes those tokens and builds the following DOM:

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── p
            └── #text: Hello world.

Note that the tree builder created some elements (html, head, body) that did not have any corresponding tags in the source text. These elements have optional start and end tags, but implied tags can also happen in non-conforming cases, such as when a required end tag is omitted (more on this in the Implied tags section).

Error handling

The HTML parser specification specifies exactly what to do in case of an error. Technically, an implementation is allowed to abort processing upon an error, but no browser does that. Instead, they follow the specification to recover from the error in some particular way, which is carefully designed to be compatible with web content.

When the parser identifies something that is an error, it says that "it is a parse error". Some parse errors have an identifying code. For example, for the character reference &#0;:

If the number is 0x00, then this is a null-character-reference parse error. Set the character reference code to 0xFFFD.

Detecting character encoding

The character encoding of the document must be specified (but not all documents do this). Not only must it be specified, but it must be UTF-8 (again not all documents do this).

Character encoding can be specified in a number of ways. First, it can be specified at the transport layer; e.g., HTTP Content-Type can have a charset parameter that gives the encoding of the document. If present, this wins over a meta element encoding declaration.

The document can also start with a byte order mark (BOM), for UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings. If present, this wins over both HTTP and meta encoding declarations.

Otherwise, a meta element can be used. It comes in two forms.

<meta charset="utf-8">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

In earlier versions of HTML, only the second variant was specified, but browsers already supported the first variant as well. The reason for this is that there were documents on the web that incorrectly omitted quote marks even though the value contains a space.

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8>

Note that "charset=utf-8" appears as its own attribute.

The HTML standard took the opportunity to make the shorter syntax conforming (that is, <meta charset="utf-8">), which lowers the barrier to specify an encoding for the document.

Originally, <meta http-equiv> was a feature intended for web servers, not for clients. The idea was that servers could scan for the http-equiv in an HTML file, and set the corresponding HTTP headers when serving it. Servers didn't do that. Instead, web browsers picked it up.

Also note the absurdity of encoding the character encoding in the character encoding of the document that you're trying to decode, especially when it’s not the very first thing in the file (like in, e.g., CSS and XML).

Before the HTML parser starts, a prescan of the byte stream can take place in an attempt to find a character encoding declaration. This prescan is essentially a simplified HTML parser. The prescan is usually done on the first 1024 bytes, and there is a conformance requirement for documents to include the encoding declaration within the first 1024 bytes.

The prescan supports skipping comments and bogus comments, but doesn't make any effort to skip, e.g., style elements. So something that looks like an encoding declaration inside a style element will be picked up as an encoding declaration by the prescan.

The encoding that is picked up by the prescan, if any, is only tentative. The actual HTML parser can find an encoding declaration with a different value (uncommon but possible), and if it does, the parser will change the encoding to the newly found value, either on the fly (if possible), or by reloading the document with the new encoding.

If the document is encoded in a UTF-16 encoding, then any inline encoding declaration is ignored, since UTF-16 will be detected as such by its bit pattern (usually by the initial byte order mark). The prescan assumes an ASCII compatible encoding, so it will not find an encoding declaration in a UTF-16 document (assuming the declaration is encoded in UTF-16). The HTML parser can find an encoding declaration in a UTF-16 document, but if it says anything but the same variant of UTF-16, it must be incorrect and therefore it is ignored.

However, if the document is not UTF-16 and an encoding declaration is found that claims UTF-16, it will be interpreted as saying UTF-8. The declaration is incorrect, but assuming UTF-8 is apparently better than ignoring it.

Another rewrite is the x-user-defined encoding label, which is changed to windows-1252, but only when found in a meta element, not anywhere else. The reason for this is that web sites used this encoding label together with a custom font to get visual rendering of their language's non-ASCII characters, instead of using Unicode and a proper font. Meanwhile, x-user-defined is an actual encoding that web pages use for binary data using the XMLHttpRequest API. The solution that Chrome invented and that Firefox copied was to rewrite this label but just for meta in HTML.

If no encoding declaration is found, then the default will usually depend on the user's locale. The most common default is windows-1252, but there are 33 other locales with other defaults. For example, Arabic defaults to windows-1256, and Japanese defaults to Shift_JIS. Having locale-specific default encodings on a global information network is, of course, also absurd.

When the prescan has happened and potentially found a tentative encoding to use, we're ready to preprocess the input stream.

Preprocessing the input stream

At this stage, we are working with a stream of code points rather than a stream of bytes. This is responsible for normalizing newlines to line feed characters. This is defined as follows:

U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) characters and U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters are treated specially. Any LF character that immediately follows a CR character must be ignored, and all CR characters must then be converted to LF characters. Thus, newlines in HTML DOMs are represented by LF characters, and there are never any CR characters in the input to the tokenization stage.

Note that scripts can insert text into the input stream using the document.write() API. Preprocessing the input stream thus happens for such text as well.

For implementations that support document.write(), it is important that this is implemented as specified, in particular how to handle CRLF. Consider the following document.

<!DOCTYPE html><pre>x<script>document.write('\r');</script>
y

Without running script, the input stream just has one line feed. Loading the document with scripting enabled, there will be a CRLF pair; the script writes a CR character, which appears in the input stream after the script end tag, and then the source markup has a LF as the next character.

However, the newline needs to be present in the DOM while the script runs, because the script is able to observe what the DOM tree looks like, or it might do another document.write(). So it can't wait for the following LF before inserting the LF in the DOM.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<pre id=pre>x<script>
document.write('\r');
alert(pre.innerText.length);
</script>
y

This will alert "2" (the "x" and the carriage return converted to line feed). The line feed after the </script> tag, which appears in the input stream after the script has run, is then ignored.

Tokenizer

The tokenizer processes each character in the input stream with a state machine. The output is a series of tokens that are used by the tree construction stage.

The possible tokens are: doctype, start tag, end tag, comment, character, and end-of-file. The tokens have various properties:

Tags and text

Let's walk through a simple example to see how the tokenizer works: how it switches states and what tokens are produced.

<p>Hello</p>

The tokenizer always starts in the data state, which is defined as follows:

Consume the next input character:

U+0026 AMPERSAND (&)
Set the return state to the data state. Switch to the character reference state.
U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN (<)
Switch to the tag open state.
U+0000 NULL
This is an unexpected-null-character parse error. Emit the current input character as a character token.
EOF
Emit an end-of-file token.
Anything else
Emit the current input character as a character token.

The next input character is the "<", which switches the tokenizer to the tag open state:

Consume the next input character:

U+0021 EXCLAMATION MARK (!)
Switch to the markup declaration open state.
U+002F SOLIDUS (/)
Switch to the end tag open state.
ASCII alpha
Create a new start tag token, set its tag name to the empty string. Reconsume in the tag name state.
U+003F QUESTION MARK (?)
This is an unexpected-question-mark-instead-of-tag-name parse error. Create a comment token whose data is the empty string. Reconsume in the bogus comment state.
EOF
This is an eof-before-tag-name parse error. Emit a U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN character token and an end-of-file token.
Anything else
This is an invalid-first-character-of-tag-name parse error. Emit a U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN character token. Reconsume in the data state.

The input so far is "<p", and the "p" falls into ASCII alpha clause. At this point a start tag token is created (but not yet emitted), and then the "p" is reconsumed in the tag name state:

Consume the next input character:

U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION (tab); U+000A LINE FEED (LF); U+000C FORM FEED (FF); U+0020 SPACE
Switch to the before attribute name state.
U+002F SOLIDUS (/)
Switch to the self-closing start tag state.
U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN (>)
Switch to the data state. Emit the current tag token.
ASCII upper alpha
Append the lowercase version of the current input character (add 0x0020 to the character's code point) to the current tag token's tag name.
U+0000 NULL
This is an unexpected-null-character parse error. Append a U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER character to the current tag token's tag name.
EOF
This is an eof-in-tag parse error. Emit an end-of-file token.
Anything else
Append the current input character to the current tag token's tag name.

The input is still "<p", and the "p" falls into the Anything else clause. The start tag token's name is now "p". The tokenizer stays in this state for the next character.

The input is now <p>; the ">" switches back to the data state and emits the start tag token. This token will immediately be handled by the tree builder before the tokenizer can continue.

The next few character are "Hello", handled in the data state. Each character emits a character token with the data being the given character, i.e., 5 character tokens "H" "e" "l" "l" "o".

The </p> goes through similar states as the start tag, but obviously creates an end tag token instead. The "/" switches to the end tag open state:

Consume the next input character:

ASCII alpha
Create a new end tag token, set its tag name to the empty string. Reconsume in the tag name state.
U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN (>)
This is a missing-end-tag-name parse error. Switch to the data state.
EOF
This is an eof-before-tag-name parse error. Emit a U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN character token, a U+002F SOLIDUS character token and an end-of-file ton.
Anything else
This is an invalid-first-character-of-tag-name parse error. Create a comment token whose data is the empty string. Reconsume in the bogus comment state.

Finally, the end of the input stream is said to be an "EOF" character, which emits an end-of-file token. The series of tokens produced is thus:

Start tag (p), character (H), character (e), character (l), character (l), character (o), end tag (p), end-of-file.

This book contains a number of quizzes, which you should be able to answer with the information in this book. These quizzes originally took place on X. Here is the first quiz in this book:

#HTMLQuiz (don't cheat!): What kind of node will be inserted into the body for such contents?

<body></хелоу></body>

Note that that isn't the ASCII "x" but instead U+0445 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER HA. If we look at the end tag open state above, we find:

Anything else
This is an invalid-first-character-of-tag-name parse error. Create a comment token whose data is the empty string. Reconsume in the bogus comment state.

The correct answer is thus a comment node.

Note that the start tag open state handles non-ASCII alpha differently; it will emit the < and the current input character as character tokens.

Attributes

#HTMLQuiz (don't cheat :) ). What class will the <div class="a" class="b"> have?

Given the following markup:

<p id="x">

The tokenizer goes through these states:

  1. Start in the data state.

  2. Consume "<": Switch to the tag open state.

  3. Consume "p": Reconsume in the tag name state.

  4. Consume "p": Append the current input character to the current tag token's tag name.

  5. Consume " ": Switch to the before attribute name state.

  6. Consume "i": Reconsume in the attribute name state.

  7. Consume "i": Append the current input character to the current attribute's name.

  8. Consume "d": Append the current input character to the current attribute's name.

  9. Consume "=": Switch to the before attribute value state.

  10. Consume """: Switch to the attribute value (double-quoted) state.

  11. Consume "x": Append the current input character to the current attribute's value.

  12. Consume """: Switch to the after attribute value (quoted) state.

  13. Consume ">": Switch to the data state. Emit the current tag token.

  14. Consume EOF: Emit an end-of-file token.

The attribute name state says:

When the user agent leaves the attribute name state (and before emitting the tag token, if appropriate), the complete attribute's name must be compared to the other attributes on the same token; if there is already an attribute on the token with the exact same name, then this is a duplicate-attribute parse error and the new attribute must be removed from the token.

The correct answer to the quiz is thus "a". Here's another quiz about attributes:

Let's try another one. What attributes will <img> contain in the following case? #HTMLQuiz

<img src=1.png /re/>

Let's check. The first part, before the slash, is straightforward.

<img src=1.png

The tokenizer will be in the before attribute name state when it consumes the "/", which says:

U+002F SOLIDUS (/); U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN (>); EOF
Reconsume in the after attribute name state.

The after attribute name state says:

U+002F SOLIDUS (/)
Switch to the self-closing start tag state.

OK. Now we consume the "r":

Anything else
This is an unexpected-solidus-in-tag parse error. Reconsume in the before attribute name state.

So it will start a new attribute at this point:

Anything else
Start a new attribute in the current tag token. Set that attribute name and value to the empty string. Reconsume in the attribute name state.

The attribute name state, for both the "r" and the "e":

Anything else
Append the current input character to the current attribute's name.

The second "/" is then treated as follows:

U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION (tab); U+000A LINE FEED (LF); U+000C FORM FEED (FF); U+0020 SPACE; U+002F SOLIDUS (/); U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN (>); EOF
Reconsume in the after attribute name state.

After attribute name state:

002F SOLIDUS (/)
Switch to the self-closing start tag state.

Self-closing start tag state:

U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN (>)
Set the self-closing flag of the current tag token. Switch to the data state. Emit the current tag token.

Ah, this time the tokenizer got what it expected, a > after a slash.

The correct answer is {src:"1.png", "re":""}.

On a historical aside, Internet Explorer 6 (and maybe some other versions) had a special behavior for the style attribute, where it would just append to the list of CSS declarations if there were multiple style attributes, instead of dropping duplicate attributes (which it did for all other attributes). No other browser matched IE, though, so we could get away with not supporting this.

Another interesting aspect of Internet Explorer 6 was that it treated ` as a quote character around attribute values. Other browsers did not do this. This could easily result in differences in the resulting DOM. If you were using a conforming HTML parser to sanitize user input, but also have the serializer leave attribute values unquoted when they could be, it would open up a security hole to let the attacker insert script and have it run for visitors using IE. For example, maybe you would roundtrip entered values in a form:

<input name=first-name value=Sam>
<input name=last-name value=Sneddon>

Now consider if Sam enters "`" as the first name and "` autofocus onfocus=alert(document.cookie) " as the last name:

<input name=first-name value=`>
<input name=last-name value="` autofocus onfocus=alert(document.cookie) ">

Oops. Yes, little gsnedders autofocus, we call them.

To avoid this, the HTML standard made ` in unquoted attribute values a parse error in 2009.

Character references

Let's do a simpler one this time. How many named entities (&quot;, &amp; and so on) are there in HTML? #HTMLQuiz

XML has 5 predefined named entities: &amp; &lt; &gt; &quot; &apos;.

HTML 4.01 had 252 named entities, but &apos; was not one of them.

HTML5 added &apos;, which already worked in browsers except for IE, plus a few all-uppercase variations, like &LT; and a bunch of non-conforming without the semicolon, like &nbsp.

Then, as part of adding MathML to HTML in 2008, all of the MathML named entities were added to HTML. In total, the number is now 2231.

Two named character references have changed what they expand to since HTML 4.01: &lang; and &rang;. The following email from Ian Hickson, from 2 March 2008, summarises what happened:

On Sun, 1 Jul 2007, Øistein E. Andersen wrote:

HTML5 currently maps &lang; and &rang; to U+3008 LEFT ANGLE BRACKET, U+3009 RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET, both belonging to `CJK angle brackets' in U+3000--U+303F CJK Symbols and Puntuation.

HTML 4.01 maps them to U+2329 LEFT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET, U+232A RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET from `Angle brackets' in the range U+2300--U+23FF Miscellaneous Technical.

Unicode 5.0 notes:

These are discouraged for mathematical use because of their canonical equivalence to CJK punctuation.

It would probably be better to use U+27E8 MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET, U+27E9 MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET from `Mathematical brackets' in U+27C0--U+27EF Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A, characters that did not yet exist when HTML 4.01 was published.

I've made this change.

So now these map to the correct mathematical angle brackets that didn't exist in Unicode when HTML 4.01 was written.

An interesting aspect is parsing of named character references that lack the trailing semicolon. The parser will expand them to the corresponding character even when the next character is an alphanumeric.

Arts&ampcrafts

Is equivalent to:

Arts&amp;crafts

The interesting part is dealing with the &not and &notin character references. How does the parser know whether to expand the &not character reference if the next character is an "i"? The spec has the following example:

If the markup contains (not in an attribute) the string I'm &notit; I tell you, the character reference is parsed as "not", as in, I'm ¬it; I tell you (and this is a parse error). But if the markup was I'm &notin; I tell you, the character reference would be parsed as "notin;", resulting in I'm ∉ I tell you (and no parse error).

However, if the markup contains the string I'm &notit; I tell you in an attribute, no character reference is parsed and string remains intact (and there is no parse error).

The parser will consume characters in the Named character reference state so long as there is a prefix match for a name in the table of named character references, until there's only one match, or no match.

The example above touches on named character references in attributes, which is parsed slightly differently. If there is a match, in an attribute value, the spec says to treat it as follows:

If the character reference was consumed as part of an attribute, and the last character matched is not a U+003B SEMICOLON character (;), and the next input character is either a U+003D EQUALS SIGN character (=) or an ASCII alphanumeric, then, for historical reasons, flush code points consumed as a character reference and switch to the return state.

So the following would not expand the named character reference, even though it does outside attribute values:

<input value="Arts&ampcrafts">

This matched what IE did, but this was not interoperable back in 2006. One aspect that the standard now requires but that IE did not do, was to not expand the character reference if the next character is "=". It was added based on web compatibility research that I did in 2009 that found that web pages typically expected such cases to not expand the character reference.

On Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:25:39 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

It might still be reasonable to change the parsing rules to make the above case less surprising:

  1. Tweak the parsing rules so that = is treated the same as 0-9a-zA-Z.

It would be different form what IE does, but I would be surprised if Web compat requires the IE behavior here.

I'd really like to not risk changes to the parsing rules in this area. It took a lot of careful study to get to where we are now, and without repeating that work, I'd be very reluctant to experiment.

Data:

http://philip.html5.org/data/entities-without-semicolon-followed-by-equals.txt

The ones below are those that would be affected by this change. This is 50 occurrences out of 425K pages.

As far as I can tell, all of these seem to expect the literal text treatment rather than the entity treatment.

Typically, pages would have unescaped ampersands in URLs, like this:

<script src="_fuse/1/elements.asp?RD=2&GT=627&Regen=78"></script>

Note that &GT is a named character reference.

Apart from named character references, there are also numeric character references.

&#65;
&#x41;

The first one is a decimal character reference, the second one is hexadecimal. They both map to the character "A". The hexadecimal form is case-insensitive, including the "x". The semicolon is required for authors, but the parser will infer it if it's missing. If the number is 0, or outside Unicode’s range (greater than 0x10FFFF), or if it’s in the surrogate range (0xD800 to 0xDFFF), then it will expand to the replacement character (U+FFFD), and it will also be a parse error.

A difference from HTML 4.01, and from XML for that matter, is what some of the numerical character references map to, that would otherwise map to control characters. The HTML standard has this mapping table for numeric character references:

Number Code point Character name
0x80 0x20AC EURO SIGN (€)
0x82 0x201A SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK (‚)
0x83 0x0192 LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK (ƒ)
0x84 0x201E DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK („)
0x85 0x2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (…)
0x86 0x2020 DAGGER (†)
0x87 0x2021 DOUBLE DAGGER (‡)
0x88 0x02C6 MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT (ˆ)
0x89 0x2030 PER MILLE SIGN (‰)
0x8A 0x0160 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON (Š)
0x8B 0x2039 SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (‹)
0x8C 0x0152 LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE (Œ)
0x8E 0x017D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH CARON (Ž)
0x91 0x2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (‘)
0x92 0x2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (')
0x93 0x201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK (")
0x94 0x201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK (")
0x95 0x2022 BULLET (•)
0x96 0x2013 EN DASH (–)
0x97 0x2014 EM DASH (—)
0x98 0x02DC SMALL TILDE (˜)
0x99 0x2122 TRADE MARK SIGN (™)
0x9A 0x0161 LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON (š)
0x9B 0x203A SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (›)
0x9C 0x0153 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE (œ)
0x9E 0x017E LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON (ž)
0x9F 0x0178 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (Ÿ)

Browsers had this mapping already when the HTML parser was specified, and there were web pages that relied on it. These are parse errors, however, so don't use them.

One final character reference that is a parse error is &#xD; which maps to U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN. It's the only way to get such a character in the DOM from the parser; newlines are otherwise normalized to U+000A LINE FEED in the preprocessing stage.

Comments

Comments ought to be pretty simple; they start with <!-- and end with -->, and that's that. Right?

Well, not quite. Both SGML and web browsers had different aspects of complexity for comments. Let's tackle the SGML story first. Ian Hickson wrote the following in a blog post in January 2006:

January 1999. I'm nineteen, in my first year studying Physics at Bath University. I read an SGML tutorial (maybe this one from 1995). I wrote a testcase. I filed a bug, in which I wrote:

Comment delimiters are "--" while inside tags.

Thus: <!-- in -- -- in -- -- in --> where "in" shows what is commented.

On the test page quoted, all is explained.

February 1999. The bug is fixed.

October 1999. The code for the fix is turned on along with the standards-mode HTML parser. Mozilla is now the first "major" browser to support SGML-style comments.

September 2000. The UN Web site breaks because it triggers standards mode but uses incorrect comment syntax. Mozilla drops full SGML comment parsing.

March 2001. Mozilla re-enables its strict comment parsing; evangelism is used to convince the broken sites to fix their markup.

May 2003. Netscape devedge publishes a document on the matter to help the Mozilla evangelists explain this to authors.

July 2003. I open a bug in the Opera bug database to get Opera to implement SGML comment parsing.

January 2004. I file another bug in the Opera bug database, having forgotten about the earlier one, to get Opera to implement SGML comment parsing.

February 2005. Håkon and I write the first draft of the Acid2 test.

March 2005. While giving a workshop on how to create test cases at Opera, I find that http://www.wassada.com/ renders correctly in Mozilla and fails to render in Opera precisely because Mozilla renders comments according to the SGML way and Opera doesn't. Over Håkon's objections, I insist on including a test for the SGML comment syntax in Acid2, citing the Wassada site as proof that we need to get interoperability on the matter. Acid2 is announced.

April 2005. Safari fixes SGML comment parsing as part of their Acid2 work. Hyatt confesses bemusement regarding this feature, joining Håkon in thinking I was wrong to insist we include this part of the test.

June 2005. Konqueror fixes SGML comment parsing as part of their Acid2 work.

October 2005. Opera fixes SGML comment parsing as part of their Acid2 work, after many complaints internally telling me I was wrong to include this part of the test. I point to the Wassada site. They point to the dozens of sites that break because of this change. I point to the fact that they aren't broken in Mozilla. They realise their fix was not quite right, and make things work, but still grumble about it being stupid.

November 2005. Mark writes a long document explaining the SGML comment parsing mode. Håkon proposes removing this part of the test from Acid2. I point out that as long as the specs require this, we don't have a good reason to remove it from the test.

December 2005. Prince implement SGML comment parsing in their efforts to pass Acid2, but privately raise concerns about this parsing requirement.

January 2006. I realise I was wrong.

I've now fixed the spec and fixed the Acid2 test.

I'd like to apologise to everyone whose time I've wasted by insisting on following the specs on this matter for the past seven years. You probably number in the hundreds by now. Sometimes, the spec is wrong, and we just have to fix it. I'm sorry it took me so long to realise that this was the case here.

The SGML comment syntax might make more sense if you consider that it works the same in markup declarations in the DTD. For example, the following is the definition of the param element in the HTML 4.01 DTD:

<!ELEMENT PARAM - O EMPTY              -- named property value --
<!ATTLIST PARAM
  id          ID             #IMPLIED  -- document-wide unique id --
  name        CDATA          #REQUIRED -- property name --
  value       CDATA          #IMPLIED  -- property value --
  valuetype   (DATA|REF|OBJECT) DATA   -- How to interpret value --
  type        %ContentType;  #IMPLIED  -- content type for value
                                          when valuetype=ref --
  >

OK, so we don't need to worry about the SGML comment syntax anymore.

What were browsers doing, then? They generally tried to keep it simple, with comments ending with "-->", but with a twist. If the browser reached the end of the input stream inside a comment, it would rewind the input stream and reparse the comment in a different tokenizer state that ends a comment at the first ">".

<!-- This > is a comment -->
<!-- Where > does this end?

Reparsing is something that was carefully avoided in the standard. Apart from being a problem for streaming parsers, it also presents a security issue:

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

I don't understand these security concerns. How is reparsing it after reaching EOF any different from someone writing exactly the same script without opening a comment before it? Won't the script be executed in exactly the same way in both cases?

The difference is that a sanitiser script would notice a <script> element, but would not notice the contents of a comment. Comments are considered safe, the publisher would not expect the contents of a comment to suddenly be invoked.

The comment could be, e.g.:

   <!--

     Let's hope nobody ever manages to sneak this into our site through a
     cross-site scripting attack!:

        <script> doSomethingEvil(); </script>

     That would be terrible!

     Oh well. There's no way they could aCONNECTION TERMINATED BY PEER

Browsers also did reparsing in some other situations, such as an unclosed title element and, in particular, an unclosed <!-- in a script element (which looks like a comment but is actually text). More on this in the Script states section. Switching to not doing reparsing was not without facing web compatibility problems. In March 2008, I sent the following email to the public-html mailing list:

We were fixing our bugs regarding reparsing, but were a bit scared to fix reparsing of comments and escaped text spans, so I asked in #whatwg if someone could be kind enough to provide some data on the matter…

Philip` found 128 pages with open <!-- out of 130K pages, listed in http://philip.html5.org/data/pages-with-unclosed-comments.txt . I looked through the first 82 pages. 40 of those would work better if we reparse, 1 would work slightly worse, and the rest would be unaffected. This means that about 0.05% of pages would break if we didn't reparse.

Opera currently doesn't reparse comments in limited/no quirks mode, but a few pages below break in Opera because of that. (We still reparse open escaped text spans even in no quirks mode.)

Also found during this research was that a lot of pages use --!> and expect it to close the comment. --!> closes comments in WebKit and Gecko. We'll probably make --!> close comments given this data.

We will probably not stop reparsing comments (in quirks mode) or escaped text spans (at least for script and style), at least not until other browsers do so. Maybe we can limit reparsing of escaped text spans to quirks mode, but we don't particularly like parsing differences between modes.

(We will come back to "escaped text spans" in the Script states section.)

To counter the web compatibility problems, the string --!> was added as a way the parser can close a comment. Reparsing was not specified, but browsers continued to do that (until they rewrote their parsers).

An IEism that was adopted in the standard was that <!--> and <!---> represent empty comments. That is, the dashes in the <!-- can overlap the dashes in the -->.

Bogus comments

Have you ever seen an HTML page with an XML declaration at the top?

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>

If so, then you have stumbled across a "bogus comment". In HTML, some things cause the tokenizer to switch to the bogus comment state, which looks for the first ">" to end the comment (rather than "-->" or "--!>"). The following is thus equivalent:

<!--?xml version="1.0"?-->
<!DOCTYPE html>

Apart from <?, the sequence </ followed by something that is not a-zA-Z, or <! that is not followed by doctype (case-insensitive) or -- or, in foreign content, [CDATA[ (case-sensitive), starts a bogus comment.

Doctypes

There are 16 tokenizer states dedicated to doctypes, not including the tag open state (<) or the markup declaration open state (<!):

The reason is that the doctype used to have more stuff in it than just <!doctype html>. This is the doctype for HTML 4.01:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

There's the doctype name (HTML), the keyword PUBLIC (which could also be SYSTEM), the public identifier (-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN), and the system identifier (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd). (In SGML, the public and system identifiers both identify a DTD. The public identifier would be used by an SGML parser to look up a local DTD in a catalog.)

Since the doctype is used for determining rendering mode, and since the strings are exposed in the DOM, the tokenizer can’t just skip to the first ">" and then emit the token; it needs to collect the public and system identifiers.

What happens if you have garbage in the doctype? It depends on where that garbage is; stuff after the system identifier is silently ignored. Unexpected characters elsewhere will set the force-quirks flag and switch to the bogus DOCTYPE state, which looks for a ">" to end the doctype.

Using the "PUBLIC" or "SYSTEM" keywords but omitting the strings will set the force-quirks flag.

CDATA sections

CDATA sections are only supported in foreign content, i.e., when the current node is an SVG or MathML element. The effect is that text between the <![CDATA[ and ]]> markers are treated as text rather than as markup, so you can use & and < without escaping them as character references.

The markup declaration open state says:

Case-sensitive match for the string "[CDATA[" (the five uppercase letters "CDATA" with a U+005B LEFT SQUARE BRACKET character before and after)
Consume those characters. If there is an adjusted current node and it is not an element in the HTML namespace, then switch to the CDATA section state. Otherwise, this is a cdata-in-html-content parse error. Create a comment token whose data is the "[CDATA[" string. Switch to the bogus comment state.

So in HTML content, it ends up as a comment instead.

Where CDATA sections are supported, the tokenizer emits normal character tokens for the text. This means that such text ends up being normal Text nodes in the DOM, rather than CDATASection nodes, which the DOM also has.

As part of writing this book, I found a bug in Safari and Chrome: CDATA sections are not supported in HTML integration points or MathML text integration points (more on this in The foreign lands: SVG and MathML). So avoid using it in, e.g., the SVG title element.

Most likely, the only case you will see CDATA sections in HTML is in the SVG script element, where it is supported in all browsers.

RCDATA, RAWTEXT and PLAINTEXT states

When the tree builder sees certain start tag tokens, it will switch state of the tokenizer to RCDATA, RAWTEXT, or PLAINTEXT.

Those start tag tokens are:

When in the RCDATA state, the tokenizer still supports character references, but will not enter the tag open state when seeing a <; instead it switches to the RCDATA less-than sign state. It will continue through a path of RCDATA-specific states to tokenize an end tag. If a matching end tag is found, it will create an end tag token. Otherwise, it will emit the consumed characters as character tokens, and switch back to the RCDATA state.

The RAWTEXT state is similar to RCDATA, except that character references are not supported.

The PLAINTEXT state is similar to RAWTEXT, except that it can never switch to any other state:

Consume the next input character:

U+0000 NULL
This is an unexpected-null-character parse error. Emit a U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER character token.
EOF
Emit an end-of-file token.
Anything else
Emit the current input character as a character token.

Effectively, the rest of the document is unconditionally treated as plain text.

Script states

Another #HTMLQuiz (don't cheat :) ). What will be alerted here?

<script>alert('<!--<script>x</script>-->')</script>

Tokenizing script elements is complicated. The following states govern how to tokenize script elements:

"Script data double escaped dash dash state"?! Well, let's start from the beginning, shall we?

Before the HTML parser was specified, browsers would parse script elements similarly to how they parse style elements. It was raw text, until the right end tag was found. But there was a twist: what looked like an HTML comment, i.e., <!-- -->, would allow </script> to be embedded inside without closing the script. (And similarly for style, and also xmp, title, textarea, etc.)

Now, there was also a complication on top of that. Remember how unclosed comments would cause browsers to rewind the input stream and reparse in a different state? That applied here as well. If you reached end-of-file while in an "escaped text span", browsers would rewind and close the script on the first script end tag even if it was after a <!--.

As it turns out, there were web pages that relied on both of these features.

In June 2007, Ian Hickson specified the first aspect, but not reparsing. The commit message said "Support the insane comment stuff in CDATA and RCDATA blocks". (CDATA was later renamed to RAWTEXT.)

In August 2009, Henri Sivonen sent an email to the public-html mailing list with the subject "Issues arising from not reparsing":

Firefox nightlies have had an HTML5 parser implementation behind a pref for a month now. The Web compat issues that have been uncovered have been surprisingly few, which is great.

However, there are three Web compat issues that don't have trivial fixes. They all are related to the HTML5 parsing algorithm not recovering from errors by rewinding the stream and reparsing with different rules. As such, if these are treated as bugs, they are spec bugs.

  1. When the string <!-- occurs inside a string literal in JavaScript, it starts and escape that hides </script> and the rest of the page is eaten into the script. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503632

  2. When a script starts with <script><!-- but doesn't end with --></script> (ends with only </script>), the rest of the page is eaten into the script. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504941

  3. When there's no </title> end tag, the page gets eaten into the title. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508075 see also https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3905 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42945

Personally, I'd like to avoid reparsing if at all possible, because it's a security risk and because it complicates the parser.

I did some research and proposed a solution, which was adopted in the standard:

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:26:39 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

On Aug 12, 2009, at 22:55, Ian Hickson wrote:

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Henri Sivonen wrote:

On Aug 12, 2009, at 12:10, Henri Sivonen wrote:

I think I'll create a wiki page with requirements and a proposed delta spec first, though, because others on #whatwg were interested in pondering alternative solutions given a set of requirements.

Wiki page created: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/CDATA_Escapes

Wow. Please can we stick to just the current magic escapes and not add even more magic?

The current magic without all the magic that current browsers implement lead to some incompatibilities with existing content. I don't know how often a user would hit these issues, but when the problems do occur, they wreck the whole page. Therefore, I think we should seriously try to improve the magic so that it substitutes the current browser magic better in practice while still not doing reparsing.

http://philip.html5.org/data/script-open-in-escape.txt has 622 pages.

http://philip.html5.org/data/script-close-in-escape-without-script-open-2.txt has 708 pages.

Most of these look like they would break with what's currently specced.

The two sets might overlap. Some of the pages are not relevant, because the extract might appear inside an HTML comment. The breakage can be up to around 1300 pages out of 425000.

The common pattern is:

A.

<script><!--

…

//--></script>

However, there are several patterns that break with that is currently

specced:

B.

<script><!--

…

</script>

C.

<script><!--

…

//-->

<!--</script>

D.

<script><!--

…

//-- ></script>

E.

<script><!--

…

//- -></script>

F.

<script><!--

…

//- - ></script>

G.

<script><!--

…

//-></script>

etc.

where … can be

  1. document.write('<script></script>');

  2. document.write('<script></script><script></script>');

  3. document.write('<script></script>'); document.write('<script></script>');

  4. document.write('<script>'); document.write('</script>');

  5. document.write('<scr'+'ipt></scr'+'ipt>');

  6. document.write('<scr'+'ipt></script>');

  7. document.write('<script></scr'+'ipt>');

Proposal #3 in http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/CDATA_Escapes reads:

For script, when in an escaped text span, set a flag after having seen "<script" followed by whitespace or slash or greater-than. "</script" followed by whitespace or slash or greater-than only closes the element if the flag is not set, and otherwise emits the text and resets the flag. Exiting an escaped text span also resets the flag.

It breaks with (6) combined with any of A-G. I found 3 sites doing this.

www.grandparents.com/gp/content/expert-advice/family-matters/article/thatevildaughterinlaw.html

www.celebrity-link.com/c106/showcelebrity_categoryid-10687.html

me.yaplog.jp/viewBoard.blog?boardId=975

It also breaks for (7) combined with B or D-G (note that what's currently specced also breaks here). I found 1 site doing this.

www.jeuxactu.com/images-fiche-soul-calibur-legends-8219-4-6.html

The sites appear to have one or two (or three) pages with the relevant script. This makes proposal #3 break for something on the order of 10 pages out of 425000. This is surprisingly close to the current behavior of doing reparsing. (Not reparsing leads to better performance since you don't need to wait for the whole page to have loaded before deciding where the script should end, and it doesn't have the security issue.)

I can't come up with a different proposal that breaks less pages.

In March 2010, in response to someone being confused about the script states, Henri Sivonen wrote:

The purpose of those states is to support existing script content without ever rewinding the input stream.

The problem is basically this:

  1. Some pages assume they can use the string "</script>" inside a script if they enclose the script content in <!-- … -->

  2. Other pages Have <!-- at the start of the script but forget --> from the end.

Complexity ensues. So far, what's in the spec looks like a successful solution. I've implemented in experimentally in Gecko, and I haven't seen bug reports about it.

Going back to the quiz, the correct answer is that <!--<script>x</script>--> will be alerted. The tokens produced for the markup are (combining adjacent character tokens to a single token):

OK. What about a more "problematic" case?

Before
<script><!--
document.write('<script></scr'+'ipt>');
</script>
After

After emitting the script start tag, the tree builder switches the tokenizer's state to the script data state. For the <!--, we step through these states:

The newline then switches to the script data escaped state. Then we stay in that state for the "document.write('" part.

The nested <script> goes through these states:

OK, now the tokenizer is in a state that will ignore the next script end tag. Since the embedded end tag is split up, the tokenizer skips past it without changing state. Then, the script end tag goes through these states:

It then stays in the script data escaped state until the end-of-file. The tokens produced are:

The resulting DOM is:

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── #text: Before
        └── script
            └── #text: <!-- document.write('<script></scr'+'ipt>'); </script> After

Since there is no actual script end tag, the script will not be executed. Executing scripts is, apart from constructing the DOM, part of the tree construction stage.

Tree construction

Parsing a simple document

Let's try a simple example and see what happens in the tree construction stage.

<!doctype html>
<div>Divitis is a serious condition.</div>

The tokenizer will produce these tokens:

The tree construction stage (or the tree builder) will then take the stream of tokens as its input, and mutate a Document object as its result.

There are a number of insertion modes, which govern how the tokens are handled. Initially, the insertion mode is the "initial" insertion mode (unsurprisingly). This insertion mode is the one that does something with doctype tokens (more on this in the next section, Determining rendering mode).

In this case, a DocumentType node is appended to the Document, and then the insertion mode is changed to "before html".

In the "before html" insertion mode, we handle the next token, the "\n" character token.

A character token that is one of U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION, U+000A LINE FEED (LF), U+000C FORM FEED (FF), U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR), or U+0020 SPACE
Ignore the token.

OK, so whitespace after the doctype is ignored. Moving on.

The div start tag token is handled by the "before html" insertion mode as follows:

Anything else
Create an html element whose node document is the Document object. Append it to the Document object. Put this element in the stack of open elements.
If the Document is being loaded as part of navigation of a browsing context, then: run the application cache selection algorithm with no manifest, passing it the Document object.
Switch the insertion mode to "before head", then reprocess the token.

Notice the reference to the stack of open elements. This stack is used throughout the tree builder, for example when handling an end tag token. When an element is inserted, it is also added to the stack of open elements.

We'll gloss over the application cache stuff, as it’s not significant to parsing and the application cache feature is in the process of being removed anyway.

We then switch the insertion mode to "before head" and process the same token again. That insertion mode will insert a head element and switch to "in head" and reprocess the token. That insertion mode will pop the head element off the stack of open elements, switch to "after head", and again reprocess the same div start tag token. That insertion mode will insert a body element, switch to "in body", and, you guessed it, reprocess the token.

At this point the DOM looks like this:

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body

The "in body" insertion mode is the mode that handles most of the tags in a typical document. Let's see what it does with the div start tag token:

A start tag whose tag name is one of: "address", "article", "aside", "blockquote", "center", "details", "dialog", "dir", "div", "dl", "fieldset", "figcaption", "figure", "footer", "header", "hgroup", "main", "menu", "nav", "ol", "p", "section", "summary", "ul"

If the stack of open elements has a p element in button scope, then close a p element.

Insert an HTML element for the token.

The stack of open elements has just html and body, so there's no p element to close. (We’ll discuss the details of this in the Implied tags section.)

"Insert an HTML element" will insert a div element, and push it to the stack of open elements. The stack is now: html, body, div. The DOM is:

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── div

We stay in the "in body" insertion mode. Next, we have a character token (D).

Any other character token

Reconstruct the active formatting elements, if any.

Insert the token's character.

Set the frameset-ok flag to "not ok".

Reconstructing active formatting elements is discussed in the Misnested tags section.

"Insert the token's character" will check if there is a Text node immediately before, and if so, append to it. Otherwise it creates a new Text node. In this case, there is no Text node yet, but for the subsequent character tokens there is.

The frameset-ok flag is discussed in the Frameset section.

Finally, the end tag.

An end tag whose tag name is one of: "address", "article", "aside", "blockquote", "button", "center", "details", "dialog", "dir", "div", "dl", "fieldset", "figcaption", "figure", "footer", "header", "hgroup", "listing", "main", "menu", "nav", "ol", "pre", "section", "summary", "ul"

If the stack of open elements does not have an element in scope that is an HTML element with the same tag name as that of the token, then this is a parse error; ignore the token.

Otherwise, run these steps:

  1. Generate implied end tags.

  2. If the current node is not an HTML element with the same tag name as that of the token, then this is a parse error.

  3. Pop elements from the stack of open elements until an HTML element with the same tag name as the token has been popped from the stack.

The stack of open elements is still: html, body, div. So we run the steps above.

Step 2 means that, if you had, e.g., <div><span></div>, then it would be a parse error when handling the div end tag token. Step 3 means that elements are closed until a div is closed.

In our case, the most recently added element is indeed a div, so there's no parse error, and we pop it off the stack.

Are we done? Not quite. There is an end-of-file token, too.

An end-of-file token

If the stack of template insertion modes is not empty, then process the token using the rules for the "in template" insertion mode.

Otherwise, follow these steps:

  1. If there is a node in the stack of open elements that is not either a dd element, a dt element, an li element, an optgroup element, an option element, a p element, an rb element, an rp element, an rt element, an rtc element, a tbody element, a td element, a tfoot element, a th element, a thead element, a tr element, the body element, or the html element, then this is a parse error.

  2. Stop parsing.

The template stuff is about handling unclosed template elements.

Step 1 says that there is a parse error if there's still an open element except for those that have optional end tags.

"Stop parsing" will, among other things, execute deferred scripts, fire the DOMContentLoaded event, and wait until there is nothing that delays the load event (like images), at which point it will fire the load event on the Window.

And now we're done.

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── div
            └── #text: Divitis is a serious condition.

Determining rendering mode

#HTMLQuiz (don't cheat :)) Which doctype does not trigger quirks mode? +@RReverser <!DOCTYPE …

The doctype determines the document's rendering mode.

The following cases result in the document using quirks mode:

The following cases trigger limited quirks mode:

If the document is "an iframe srcdoc document", then the mode is no-quirks mode regardless of the doctype, and the doctype is optional in such a document.

Other doctypes leave the rendering mode as no-quirks mode.

Note that most comparisons for the public identifier uses a prefix match instead of comparing the full string. The reason for this is that web pages sometimes (around 0.1% of pages, in 2008) changed the "//EN" to the language code for the page, but it is supposed to be a language code for the DTD. Internet Explorer and Opera used to have "lax" comparison of the public identifier, while Safari and Firefox compared the full string. The pages that changed the "//EN" to something else usually expected quirks mode rendering.

Let's go back to the quiz. <!DOCTYPE YOLO> triggers quirks mode because the name is not html. <!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM> triggers quirks mode since the force-quirks flag is set by the tokenizer. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "HTML" "LOL"> triggers quirks mode because HTML is in the list of public identifiers that trigger quirks mode.

What about <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "" "" ROFL>? The empty string is different from absent public and system identifier, and is not in the list of things that trigger quirks mode. Trailing garbage in the doctype does not trigger the force-quirks flag. So it does not trigger quirks mode. The reason trailing garbage is ignored is that some web developers (about 0.02% of pages) were overzealous in converting to XHTML that they thought the doctype ought to have a trailing slash as well.

Noscript

#HTMLQuiz Which tag is implied where when scripting is disabled? <head><noscript><basefont><noscript><base>

noscript is parsed differently when scripting is enabled and when it is disabled.

When scripting is enabled, the tree builder, when handling the start tag token, switches the tokenizer's state to the RAWTEXT state. So it is parsed the same as, e.g., the style element.

When scripting is disabled, how noscript is parsed depends on if it is in head or in body. Let's do the in body case first, since it is simpler. It is parsed the same as "ordinary" elements (which includes unknown elements):

Any other start tag

Reconstruct the active formatting elements, if any.

Insert an HTML element for the token.

Note: This element will be an ordinary element.

That is, it is inserted in the DOM and the contents are parsed as normal. For example:

<!doctype html>
<body><noscript><p>This page requires JavaScript.</p></noscript></body>

Resulting DOM:

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── noscript
            └── p
                └── #text: This page requires JavaScript.

When noscript is found in head, the tree builder switches to the "in head noscript" insertion mode. Walking through the example from the quiz:

<head><noscript><basefont><noscript><base>

basefont is handled as follows in this insertion mode:

A character token that is one of U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION, U+000A LINE FEED (LF), U+000C FORM FEED (FF), U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR), or U+0020 SPACE; A comment token; A start tag whose tag name is one of: "basefont", "bgsound", "link", "meta", "noframes", "style"
Process the token using the rules for the "in head" insertion mode.

The result is that a basefont element is inserted to the noscript element.

What about the second noscript start tag?

A start tag whose tag name is one of: "head", "noscript"; Any other end tag
Parse error. Ignore the token.

It's ignored. The final tag, the base start tag, is handled under the anything else clause:

Anything else

Parse error.

Pop the current node (which will be a noscript element) from the stack of open elements; the new current node will be a head element.

Switch the insertion mode to "in head".

Reprocess the token.

It closes the noscript element, and the token is reprocessed. So the correct answer is "</noscript> before <base>".

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    │   ├── noscript
    │   │   └── basefont
    │   └── base
    └── body

The takeaway is that, out of the conforming elements in HTML, you can only use link, meta, and style in noscript in head. The typical use case is including a different stylesheet when scripting is disabled.

Back in 2007, when noscript in head was specified, browsers did different things (of course). In Firefox, noscript in head would imply a <body> start tag before it. In IE, the noscript element would be inserted in the head, but if it contained something that was not allowed in head (like an "X" character), then it would create an ill-formed DOM. Opera instead didn't insert any noscript element to the DOM. Safari changed in 2007 to allow noscript in head, and the specification was updated as a result, although what Safari did was different to what the specification said.

Frameset

Frameset is a feature that was introduced in HTML4 and immediately deprecated (and is now obsolete). It's like the iframe, but the whole page is a set of frames, in rows and columns. Such pages do not have a body element; instead they have a frameset element.

A frameset page might look like this:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
 <head>
  <title>Framed art</title>
 </head>
 <frameset rows="150,*">
  <frame src="header.html">
  <frameset cols="30%,*">
   <frame src="nav.html">
   <frame src="main.html">
  </frameset>
 </frameset>
</html>

If the tree builder finds a frameset start tag token in the "after head" insertion mode, then it creates a "frameset" page. But it's also possible for the parser to have inserted a body element, and later swapping it for a frameset element.

<!doctype html>
<p><frameset>Who am I?

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── frameset
        └── #text:

How does the parser decide if the page is a "frameset" page or a "body" page? Glad you asked.

You may recall from the Parsing a simple document section a mention of a frameset-ok flag. This flag determines whether, upon finding a frameset start tag token in the "in body" insertion mode, the page should be a frameset page.

The following things set the frameset-ok flag to "not ok".

If the flag is "not ok", then frameset start tags are ignored. Otherwise, the parser removes the body element and its children from the DOM and inserts a frameset element, and switches the insertion mode to "in frameset". This insertion mode only inserts elements for frameset, frame, and noframes start tag tokens, and only inserts Text nodes for ASCII whitespace character tokens. Everything else is dropped on the floor.

Forms

Forms have some unusual behaviors.

Form controls, such as the input element, are associated with a form element. This association is used in form submission. There is also an API to access all elements that are associated with a form (form.elements).

<!doctype html>
<form><input></form>
<script>
console.assert(document.forms[0].elements[0] ===
               document.querySelector('input'));
</script>

That's cool, but what does it have to do with parsing? Can’t the relationship just be based on the ancestor elements in the DOM?

It turns out that it can't. The association needs to happen even if the form element is not an ancestor of the form control when the form control is parsed. So long as the form end tag hasn’t been seen, form controls will be associated with an "open" form, even if it is no longer on the stack of open elements.

<!doctype html>
<div><form></div>
<input>

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── div
        │   └── form
        ├── #text:
        └── input

The input is not a descendant of the form, but it is still associated with it. How?

The parser has a form element pointer, which is set to the form element when handling a form start tag token (if it creates an element). This pointer is only reset to null when seeing an explicit form end tag, even if it is in the "wrong" place.

The parser ignores a form start tag token if the form element pointer is not null. That is, nesting forms doesn't work.

<form>
 A
 <div>
  B
  <form></form>
  C
 </div>
 D
</form>

This results in this DOM:

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── form
        │   ├── #text:  A
        │   └── div
        │       └── #text:  B C
        └── #text:  D

There's only one form element in the DOM, but otherwise the DOM is as we’d expe—wait, why is the "D" text node a child of body, and not the form? The "C" is in the same text node as the "B", so the form end tag didn’t close the div and the form. What happened?

Let's back up a bit. Up to and including the "B", parsing is straightforward.

<form>
 A
 <div>
  B

Then we have the form start tag. Since the form element pointer is not null, we ignore that tag. Very well. What about the inner form end tag?

Let's see.

An end tag whose tag name is "form"

If there is no template element on the stack of open elements, then run these substeps:

  1. Let node be the element that the form element pointer is set to, or null if it is not set to an element.

  2. Set the form element pointer to null.

  3. If node is null or if the stack of open elements does not have node in scope, then this is a parse error; return and ignore the token.

  4. Generate implied end tags.

  5. If the current node is not node, then this is a parse error.

  6. Remove node from the stack of open elements.

We clear the form element pointer, step 3 doesn't apply (node is the form), and we don’t have any implied end tags to generate. Step 5 applies since the current node is a div. The stack of open elements is:

In step 6 we remove the form, so that the stack of open elements is:

Huh, it didn't remove the div! Usually, when the parser closes an element, it pops elements off the stack until the relevant element has been popped. But here, only the form is removed, leaving the rest of the stack intact. So the current node is still the div. When we get to the "C", we thus insert that to the div.

<form>
 A
 <div>
  B
  <form></form>
  C

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── form
            ├── #text:  A
            └── div
                └── #text:  B C

Next, we find the div end tag. Since the current node is a div, this will just pop the div off the stack of open elements:

At this point, the current node is the body, which is where the "D" ends up being inserted.

This special handling is, as you might suspect, necessary for web compatibility. The specification used to handle form end tags like div end tags, but it was found to break websites, so it was changed in December 2008 to what it says now.

Did you notice that the handling of the form end tag had a check for a template element? What happens inside templates?

<template>
 <form>
  A
  <div>
   B
   <form></form>
   C
  </div>
  D
 </form>
</template>

The document's DOM, and the template element’s template contents (more on this in the Templates section), are as follows:

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    │   └── template
    │       └── #document-fragment (template contents)
    │           ├── #text:
    │           ├── form
    │           │   ├── #text:  A
    │           │   ├── div
    │           │   │   ├── #text:  B
    │           │   │   ├── form
    │           │   │   └── #text:  C
    │           │   └── #text:  D
    │           └── #text:
    └── body

There's a nested form! And the "D" Text node is where we’d expect (child of the outer form).

In templates, forms are parsed more like divs, and aren't using the form element pointer.

Tables and foster parenting

#HTMLQuiz In which order will the numbers appear for such bad HTML?

<table><tr><td>1</td></tr>2<br/><tr>3</tr>

Unexpected text or tags in tables (outside table cells) are, for historical reasons, placed before the table. This is called foster parenting.

A simple example:

<table>1

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── #text: 1
        └── table

So how does this happen? Let's step through the spec.

First, we parse the table start tag. We insert it as normal and switch to "in table".

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── table

Then we get a character token in the "in table" insertion mode.

A character token, if the current node is table, tbody, tfoot, thead, or tr element

Let the pending table character tokens be an empty list of tokens.

Let the original insertion mode be the current insertion mode.

Switch the insertion mode to "in table text" and reprocess the token.

Reprocessing in "in table text":

Any other character token

Append the character token to the pending table character tokens list.

So this collects all of the character tokens in a list. The reason for this is that, if the characters are all whitespace, then it shouldn't be foster-parented, but if there is any non-whitespace, then all those character tokens should be foster-parented together (consider spaces between words).

The next token is end-of-file:

Anything else

If any of the tokens in the pending table character tokens list are character tokens that are not ASCII whitespace, then this is a parse error: reprocess the character tokens in the pending table character tokens list using the rules given in the "anything else" entry in the "in table" insertion mode.

Otherwise, insert the characters given by the pending table character tokens list.

Switch the insertion mode to the original insertion mode and reprocess the token.

OK, so we need to check what "anything else" in "in table" says.

Anything else
Parse error. Enable foster parenting, process the token using the rules for the "in body" insertion mode, and then disable foster parenting.

Aha, this says something about foster parenting! The rules in "in body" for a non-U+0000, non-ASCII whitespace character token, is to "insert the token's character", which is an algorithm which calls into another algorithm, for finding the "appropriate place for inserting a node":

If foster parenting is enabled and target is a table, tbody, tfoot, thead, or tr element

[…]

If last table has a parent node, then let adjusted insertion location be inside last table's parent node, immediately before last table, and abort these substeps.

This is the part that says to insert the node before the table.

The example in the quiz is thus equivalent to:

2<br>3<table><tbody><tr><td>1</td></tr><tr></tr></tbody></table>

Notice that the tbody tags were not in the quiz, yet the above is equivalent. This is because, similarly to the body element, tbody has optional start and end tags. It will be inferred when handling a tr start tag token.

<table><tr><td>

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── table
            └── tbody
                └── tr
                    └── td

Although the tr element's start tag is not optional, the parser will still infer it if it is missing; the following markup produces the same DOM as the above.

<table><td>

The colgroup element also has optional start and end tags. Using a col start tag will imply a colgroup start tag before it.

All table-related elements except for the table element itself have optional end tags (including </caption>).

Table-related tags (except for table itself) are ignored outside tables (except in templates).

<body><caption>Tableless <tr>web <td>design

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── #text: Tableless web design

The last of the parsing quirks

#HTMLQuiz the HTML parser has a single difference in quirks mode compared to no-quirks. What is it?

In 2009, Henri Sivonen found that the HTML parser needed to retain a quirk for web compatibility. Here is his blog post with the timeline: The Last of the Parsing Quirks (copyright Mozilla Foundation, licensed under CC BY 4.0; modified to omit links).

I implemented a single quirk for HTML5 parsing yesterday.

March 1995
Netscape 1.1 beta 1 is released with table support. Table closes a paragraph implicitly.
August 1995
Internet Explorer 1.0 is released. Table does not close a paragraph.
May 1996
The IETF publishes experimental RFC 1942 which says that table is block level content like paragraphs (i.e. closes paragraph implicitly).
January 1997
The W3C publishes HTML 3.2 with a DTD that makes tables close paragraphs implicitly in an SGML parser.
December 1997
The W3C publishes HTML 4.0 with a DTD that makes tables close paragraphs implicitly in an SGML parser.
April 1998
The W3C revises HTML 4.0 without changing the DTD on the point of paragraphs and tables.
December 1999
The W3C publishes HTML 4.01 without changing the DTD on the point of paragraphs and tables.
May 2000
IE5 for Mac is released. It is the first shipping browser to have a quirks mode and a standards mode.
July 2001
A bug is filed saying that Mozilla is wrong in not making table close a paragraph implicitly and that Mozilla should start closing paragraphs in the standards mode.
October 2001
IE6 is released. It is the first version of IE for Windows that has a quirks mode and a standards mode. A table doesn't close a paragraph in either mode.
June 2003
The Mozilla bug is fixed making Mozilla close paragraphs upon tables in the standards mode. The quirks-mode behavior is left to not closing a paragraph upon a table.
April 2005
The Web Standards Project publishes the Acid2 test made by Ian Hickson and Håkon Lie. To pass the test, a user agent must close a paragraph upon table (in the standards mode).
April 2005
In order to pass Acid2, Safari is changed to make a table close a paragraph in the standards mode. The quirks-mode behavior is left to not cling a paragraph upon a table.
May 2005
In order to pass Acid2, Opera is changed to make a table close a paragraph in the standards mode. The quirks-mode behavior is left to not closing a ragraph upon a table.
January 2006
Ian Hickson changes the comment parsing part of Acid2 and blogs about it.
February 2006
Ian Hickson publishes the first draft of the HTML5 parsing algorithm. It makes a table close a paragraph but the source code of the spec contains a comment saying "XXX quirks: don't do this".
November 2006
IE7 is released. A table doesn't close a paragraph in either mode.
March 2008
A preliminary version of IE8 passes Acid2 when hosted on www.webstandards.org.
February 2009
I file a spec bug requesting parsing quirks be defined.
March 2009
IE8 is released. It has four layout modes. To pass Acid2, the new ones make a table close a paragraph. The parser behavior of <p><table> is now the only HTML parsing difference between the quirks and standards modes that is interoperably implemented in all of the top 4 browser engines.
March 31st 2009
Ian Hickson asks for vendor input about parsing quirks.
April 1st 2009
I start a thread about finding vendor input in Mozilla's platform development newsgroup. The <p><table> issue seems to be the only quirk left.
April 1st 2009
Philip Taylor uses the Validator.nu HTML Parser to compile a list of dmoz-listed pages where closing paragraph vs. not closing would lead to different parse trees.
April 21st 2009
Simon Pieters analyzes 50 sites from Philip's list concluding that "our options regarding <p><table> parsing are (1) having the quirk, and (2) changing Acid2".
April 22nd 2009
I check in an implementation of the quirk into the Gecko HTML5 parsing repository.
May 26th 2009
Hixie checks in the definition of the quirk into the HTML5 spec. The commit also includes this comment: "i hate myself (this quirk was basically caused by acid2; if i'd realised we could change the specs when i wrote acid2, we could have avoided having any parsing-mode quirks) -Hixie"

A big thank you to Philip Taylor and Simon Pieters for their research (both the feasibility research and the timeline research).

Scripts

When seeing a script start tag, the tree builder switches the tokenizer's state to the script data state, and changes the insertion mode to "text" (which is also used for RAWTEXT and RCDATA elements).

When seeing the script end tag, the tree builder executes the script. The details of how this works is… complicated. See the document.write() section of Chapter 4. Scripting complications.

The parser will not continue parsing until the script has been downloaded (if applicable) and executed, and also until pending stylesheets have been loaded. See the Blocking the parser section.

But, if we ignore those things, then handling of the script end tag is easy. The script element is popped off the stack of open elements, and the insertion mode is switched back to what it was before entering the "text" insertion mode.

Templates

The template element (added to HTML in June 2013) is used to declare fragments of HTML that can be cloned and inserted in the document by script. The HTML standard has the following example:

For example, consider the following document:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
 <head>
  <title>Homework</title>
 <body>
  <template id="template"><p>Smile!</p></template>
  <script>
   let num = 3;
   const fragment = document.getElementById('template').content.cloneNode(true);
   while (num-- > 1) {
     fragment.firstChild.before(fragment.firstChild.cloneNode(true));
     fragment.firstChild.textContent += fragment.lastChild.textContent;
   }
   document.body.appendChild(fragment);
  </script>
</html>

The p element in the template is not a child of the template in the DOM; it is a child of the DocumentFragment returned by the template element's content IDL attribute.

The content of the template do not end up as children of the template element. Instead they are inserted into a separate DocumentFragment, called the template contents. In the template contents, elements are inert (scripts do not run, images are not loaded, etc.). Each template element has its own template contents.

Apart from HTML parser-level syntax requirements, the template contents has no conformance requirements. An attribute that is normally required is optional in the template contents. Microsyntax requirements for attribute values do not apply in the template contents. Content model restrictions (how elements are allowed to be nested) can be violated. And so on. The reason for this is that templates usually need to have placeholders that are replaced with other content upon processing the template. For example:

<template>
 <article>
  <img src="[[ src ]]" alt="[[ alt ]]">
  <h1></h1>
 </article>
</template>

"[[ src ]]" is not a valid URL, but this is thus OK in the template contents.

template elements are allowed essentially anywhere, and allow essentially any contents. For example, a template element is not foster parented:

<table><template>

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── table
            └── template
                └── #document-fragment (template contents)

Generally, table markup outside a table is ignored:

<div><tr><td>X

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── div
            └── #text: X

However, in templates, it just works:

<template><tr><td>X

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    │   └── template
    │       └── #document-fragment (template contents)
    │           └── tr
    │               └── td
    │                   └── #text: X
    └── body

If you have unexpected content between the table row and the table cell, it would normally be foster-parented (end up before the table), but here there is no table element. Instead it ends up at the end of the template element:

<template><tr>orphan<td>X

…results in the following template contents:

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    │   └── template
    │       └── #document-fragment (template contents)
    │           ├── tr
    │           │   └── td
    │           │       └── #text: X
    │           └── #text: orphan
    └── body

The tree builder changes where to insert nodes for template elements in the "appropriate place for inserting a node" algorithm.

If the adjusted insertion location is inside a template element, let it instead be inside the template element's template contents, after its last child (if any).

Custom elements

Custom elements (added to HTML in April 2016) come in two variants:

Autonomous custom elements have a custom element name, with these requirements:

These elements parse just like unknown elements, or like some inline elements like abbr, or dfn. Which is to say, they don't implicitly close other elements, or have other special parsing behavior.

<flag-icon country="nl"></flag-icon>

Customized built-in elements are normal HTML elements, with a special is attribute. These are parsed just like they usually are, but the parser pays attention to the is attribute when creating the element.

<button is="plastic-button">Click Me!</button>

Some JavaScript is needed to create a definition of custom elements, so that they can do something useful. If you're interested in learning about this, check out Using custom elements on MDN or the section on custom elements in the HTML standard.

The select element

#HTMLQuiz how many select elements in the DOM?

<select><select><select><select>

select is a bit special. It generally ignores unexpected tags.

<select><div><b><iframe><style><plaintext></select>X

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── select
        └── #text: X

The elements that can be nested in select are: option, optgroup, script, template.

There are 3 tags that implicitly close a select and then be reprocessed: input, keygen, and textarea.

<select><input>

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── select
        └── input

The select start tag is treated just like the select end tag. Therefore, the answer to the quiz is "2".

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── select
        └── select

select inside tables are parsed in a separate insertion mode, "in select in table". This is handled the same as "in select", except that table markup closes the select element and is then reprocessed.

<table><tr><td><select><td>X

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── table
            └── tbody
                └── tr
                    ├── td
                    │   └── select
                    └── td
                        └── #text: X

Implied tags

#HTMLQuiz (don't cheat :)) Which elements will be children of body for this?

<!doctype html></p><br></br></p>

Tags can in various situations be implied by other tags, or by text content. In the Tables section we discussed table-specific implied tags, e.g., that the tr start tag is implied by a td or th start tag when "in table". The html, head and body start and end tags are optional. (See the Optional tags section in Chapter 2. The HTML syntax for the full list of optional tags.)

The br end tag is treated as a br start tag. This is handled from the "before html" insertion mode through to "in body".

</br>

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── br

A p end tag, when there's no p element "in button scope", it implies a p start tag before it, so that it ends up as an empty p element. However, this only happens in the "in body" insertion mode.

This means that, for the markup in the quiz, the first p end tag is ignored. The first br start tag steps through the insertion modes to "in body", and inserts a br element. Then the br end tag inserts another br element. Finally, the p end tag inserts an empty p element. So the correct answer is: br, br, p.

Certain end tags are optional, and are implied by some other start tag or by an ancestor's end tag. The HTML standard has an algorithm to generate implied end tags:

When the steps below require the UA to generate implied end tags, then, while the current node is a dd element, a dt element, an li element, an optgroup element, an option element, a p element, an rb element, an rp element, an rt element, or an rtc element, the UA must pop the current node off the stack of open elements.

For example, one can omit tags in a ruby element (this is the Japanese text 漢字, annotated with its reading in hiragana, with parentheses in rp elements for browsers that do not support ruby):

…<ruby>漢<rp>（<rt>かん<rp>）</rp>字<rp>（<rt>じ<rp>）</ruby>…

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── #text: …
        ├── ruby
        │   ├── #text: 漢
        │   ├── rp
        │   │   └── #text: （
        │   ├── rt
        │   │   └── #text: かん
        │   ├── rp
        │   │   └── #text: ）
        │   ├── #text: 字
        │   ├── rp
        │   │   └── #text: （
        │   ├── rt
        │   │   └── #text: じ
        │   └── rp
        │       └── #text: ）
        └── #text: …

This would render as follows:

The two main ideographs, each with its annotation in hiragana rendered in a smaller font above it.

If you have something between the head end tag and the body start tag (where only whitespace is allowed), some tags cause an element to be inserted into the head (base, basefont, bgsound, link, meta, noframes, script, style, template, title), while other tags or non-whitespace text implicitly opens the body element.

<!doctype html>
<head>
</head>
<script></script>
<noscript></noscript>

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    │   ├── #text:
    │   └── script
    ├── #text:
    └── body
        └── noscript

When seeing an a start tag if there's an a element in the list of active formatting elements (see the Active formatting elements and Noah's Ark section), then it implies an a end tag before it, but this is a parse error; the a end tag is not optional. The following example has two a start tags (end tag is mistyped as a start tag):

<p><a href="1108470371">Anchor Bar reportedly opening Las Vegas location<a>.

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── p
            ├── a href="1108470371"
            │   └── #text: Anchor Bar reportedly opening Las Vegas location
            └── a
                └── #text: .

Similarly, a table start tag in a table (not in a table cell) implies a table end tag before it (and this is also a parse error). This also happens for h1-h6 elements; any h1-h6 start tag token implicitly closes an open h1-h6 element, even if the tag names don't match.

<h1>What is an Open Title?
<h2>Intentionally Left Blank</h2>

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── h1
        │   └── #text: What is an Open Title?
        └── h2
            └── #text: Intentionally Left Blank

When in foreign content (SVG or MathML), certain start tags imply closure of open foreign content elements and are then reprocessed. More on this in The foreign lands: SVG and MathML section.

Misnested tags

#HTMLQuiz HTML allows you to nest p in a. It also generally allows you to omit </p>. Can you do both?

<a><p></a>

What happens if you close elements in the wrong order? It depends on what the markup is.

Some cases are easy, for example, the h1-h6 elements can be closed by any other h1-h6 end tag.

<h1>Syntax for Headlines</h2>
<h2>WikiMatrix - Compare them all</h1>

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── h1
        │   └── #text: Syntax for Headlines
        ├── #text:
        └── h2
            └── #text: WikiMatrix - Compare them all

The "default" handling of misnested markup, which is used for unknown elements, autonomous custom elements, and some inline elements such as span, dfn, kbd, is to close all open elements until the one given in the end tag has been closed.

<span>20 ways to <dfn>commute</span> to</dfn> work.

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── span
        │   ├── #text: 20 ways to
        │   └── dfn
        │       └── #text: commute
        └── #text:  to work.

Other elements are slightly more complicated, such as the b, i, and a elements, which are so-called formatting elements.

Active formatting elements and Noah's Ark

The formatting elements are:

Note that not all elements with a "formatting" default style is included in the list, for example the kbd element has a monospace by default but is not a formatting element.

A formatting element gets reopened across other elements until it is explicitly closed, like this:

<p><i>He's got the whole world
<p>in his hands

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── #text: He's got the whole world
        └── p
            └── i
                └── #text: in his hands

Notice that the second paragraph also has an i element.

OK, but what is Noah doing in an HTML parser? Well, in case of a flood, he saves not two but three elements per family.

<p><i>He's got the whole world
<p><i>in his hands
<p><i>He's got the whole wide world
<p><i>in his hands
<p><i>He's got the whole world in his hands.

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── #text: He's got the whole world
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── i
        │           └── #text: in his hands
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── i
        │           └── i
        │               └── #text: He's got the whole wide world
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── i
        │           └── i
        │               └── i
        │                   └── #text: in his hands
        └── p
            └── i
                └── i
                    └── i
                        └── i
                            └── #text: He's got the whole world in his hands.

In the third and fourth paragraphs, three i elements are reopened, and they open one more themselves, but the number of reopened i elements doesn't continue to increase beyond three. This is to avoid insanely huge DOMs for this kind of markup.

The Noah's Ark clause also checks the attributes, not just the tag name.

<p><i><i><i><i>
<p><i class><i class><i class><i class>
<p>Who am I?

The DOM will be:

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── i
        │           └── i
        │               └── i
        │                   └── #text:
        ├── p
        │   └── i
        │       └── i
        │           └── i
        │               └── i class=""
        │                   └── i class=""
        │                       └── i class=""
        │                           └── i class=""
        │                               └── #text:
        └── p
            └── i
                └── i
                    └── i
                        └── i class=""
                            └── i class=""
                                └── i class=""
                                    └── #text: Who am I?

Adoption Agency Algorithm

Do you recall the misnested blocks in inlines case in the History of HTML parsers section?

<!DOCTYPE html><em><p>X</em>Y</p>

The Adoption Agency Algorithm (AAA) governs how to deal with this.

Up to and including the "X", nothing surprising happens. The p element is inserted into the em element.

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        └── em
            └── p
                └── #text: X

When seeing the em end tag, the AAA kicks in. It will insert the p to the body, and insert the em to the p, and then close the em element. The resulting DOM is thus:

#document
├── DOCTYPE: html
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── em
        └── p
            ├── em
            │   └── #text: X
            └── #text: Y

So what happens with the markup in the quiz?

<a><p></a>

It is exactly the same as the <em><p></em> case above, that is, it also triggers AAA, and is thus a parse error and is invalid.

#document
└── html
    ├── head
    └── body
        ├── a
        └── p
            └── a

In July 2013, there was a change to the AAA. Before the change, content could sometimes end up in the "wrong" order (not matching source order). This change has been implemented in Firefox, but, as of October 2018 (TODO), has not been implemented in other browsers. Sad panda.

TODO loop limits, marker.

Hoisting attributes

#HTMLQuiz (don't cheat! :) ). What attributes will document.body have?

<body a="1" b="2">Hello!<body b="3" c="4">

Are you familiar with hoisting variables in JavaScript? This is kinda similar, except in HTML, if you use an html start tag or a body start tag when those elements are already open, it will set the attributes of the token (but not those that already exist on the element) on the html or body element in the DOM. This doesn't happen for any other element.

The correct answer to the quiz is thus {a: 1, b: 2, c: 4}.

Using html or body tags where they are not expected is, of course, a parse error, so don't do this.

The foreign lands: SVG and MathML

#HTMLQuiz how many children will the <svg> element have in the DOM?

<!doctype html><svg><font/><font face/></svg>

Support for parsing inline SVG and MathML in HTML was added in April 2008. There are both similarities and differences to the XML syntax.

The last bullet point is specified like this:

A start tag whose tag name is one of: "b", "big", "blockquote", "body", "br", "center", "code", "dd", "div", "dl", "dt", "em", "embed", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "head", "hr", "i", "img", "li", "listing", "menu", "meta", "nobr", "ol", "p", "pre", "ruby", "s", "small", "span", "strong", "strike", "sub", "sup", "table", "tt", "u", "ul", "var"; A start tag whose tag name is "font", if the token has any attributes named "color", "face", or "size"

Parse error.

If the parser was originally created for the HTML fragment parsing algorithm, then act as described in the "any other start tag" entry below. (fragment case)

Otherwise:

Pop an element from the stack of open elements, and then keep popping more elements from the stack of open elements until the current node is a MathML text integration point, an HTML integration point, or an element in the HTML namespace.

Then, reprocess the token.

Note that font is handled differently depending on its attributes. SVG has a font element, but so does HTML. Before SVG and MathML were added to HTML, there were web pages that used "bogus" <svg> or <math> start tags and then used HTML inside and expected the HTML to be rendered like they did in contemporary browsers. In order to not regress those pages, this breakout list of tags was specified.

The answer to the quiz is therefore: 1 child, 1 sibling. The first <font/> is parsed as an SVG element, and the <font face/> breaks out of foreign content and creates a sibling HTML font element.

The image parser macro

A parser macro in HTML is like a macro in a text editor: a shorthand that expands to something else. The HTML standard has a single parser macro (but used to have another, see the isindex parser macro): an image start tag token is treated as an img start tag token by the tree builder.

A start tag whose tag name is "image"
Parse error. Change the token's tag name to "img" and reprocess it. (Don't ask.)

It says "Don't ask", and so evelynn was apparently obliged to ask on X:

I know the MDN literally says "don't ask" but I simply HAVE TO know more about what makes the <image> tag so vile

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/image

According to Sam Sneddon, this parser macro dates back to (at least) Mosiac:

As far as I'm aware, it's not even that. It was "img" from Mosaic's first implementation in 1993. "image" I believe existed as an alias due to developers getting confused why "image" didn't work.

I replied:

Browsers did this before the HTML parser was specified. The spec has this in the source:

<!-- As of 2005-12, studies showed that around 0.2% of pages used the <image> element. -->

HTML+ had <image>, but that spec was largely ignored: https://w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/htmlplus_21.html

So, browsers had been doing this since forever, and when the HTML parser was specified, enough web content relied on it to cement the behavior to this day.

I wanted to see how prevalent image usage is today, so I ran a new query in HTTP Archive. Since there are now pages using inline SVG in text/html, and SVG has an image element, I needed to exclude those in the query. I included only matches that use the src attribute, and excluded any matches that use xlink:href or href, and limited the search to top pages (not including stuff in iframes, scripts or stylesheets):

SELECT
  page,
  markup
FROM (
  SELECT
    page,
    ARRAY_TO_STRING(REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(body, r'(?i)(<image\s+[^>]*>)'), '\n') AS markup
  FROM
    `httparchive.response_bodies.2021_08_01_mobile`
  WHERE
    page = url )
WHERE
  markup != ''
  AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(markup, r'(?i)(\ssrc\s*=)')
  AND NOT REGEXP_CONTAINS(markup, r'(?i)(\s(xlink\:)?href\s*=)')

This resulted in 5,840 matched pages, out of the total dataset of 7,447,270 pages. This amounts to about 0.08%.

The research method I used here is a bit different from what Ian Hickson did back in 2005, so the numbers aren't directly comparable. We can however conclude that usage is still non-zero. It would be possible to query historical data in HTTP Archive, to figure out if there's a trend (does usage decline over time?). This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Tags that are no longer supported

The vast majority of idiosyncrasies in HTML parsing survive, but not all. This section lists some of the things that were once special parsing behaviors, but have at some point been removed completely.

The isindex parser macro

The very first draft for HTML included an isindex tag.

This tag informs the reader that the document is an index document. As well as reading it, the reader may use a keyword search.

The effect it had was to present a form with a text field and a search button. When submitted, the typed keywords were added to the URL after a "?", and separated from each other with "+".

The first draft of HTML 4.0 marked isindex as deprecated.

When the HTML parser was specified in 2006 (already part of the initial commit), isindex was defined as a parser macro, expanding into:

<form><hr><p><label>…text…<input name="isindex" …attributes…>…text…</label></p></form>

The "…text…" depended on the user's preferred language, per spec:

The two streams of character tokens together should, together with the input element, express the equivalent of "This is a searchable index. Insert your search keywords here: (input field)" in the user's preferred language.

The "…attributes…" part was all the attributes from the "isindex" token, except with the "name" attribute set to the value "isindex" (ignoring any explicit "name" attribute).

Internet Explorer and Opera implemented isindex as a parser macro already, while Firefox and Safari treated it more like its own element, like a widget. One practical difference is that document.createElement('isindex') created an unknown element in Internet Explorer and Opera (and per spec), but worked in Firefox and Safari (before their HTML parser rewrites).

The standard was then tweaked a few times to support the action and prompt attributes, remove the <p> from the macro, change the default label text, until ultimately in 2016, isindex support was removed altogether.

Chromium removed isindex in 2014, and EdgeHTML had also removed it before the spec change. WebKit removed it in 2016, and Gecko in 2017.

The motivation for the removal is for security -- the blink-dev thread points to this XSS vector.

<isindex type=image src=1 onerror=alert(1)>

Because IE treats the isindex element (a very old html element) as a input tag you can specify the same attributes and execute javascript.

Similarly, you could use <isindex action="javascript:…"> or <isindex formaction="javascript:…"> or other variants. Today, now that isindex parses as an unknown element, the isindex-specific XSS variants don't work.

The menuitem element

TODO