proposal-errors.txt

Considerations for ErrorCollection

Presently, HTML Purifier takes a code-execution centric approach to handling
errors. Errors are organized and grouped according to which segment of the
code triggers them, not necessarily the portion of the input document that
triggered the error. This means that errors are pseudo-sorted by category,
rather than location in the document.

One easy way to "fix" this problem would be to re-sort according to line number.
However, the "category" style information we derive from naively following
program execution is still useful. After all, each of the strategies which
can report errors still process the document mostly linearly. Furthermore,
not only do they process linearly, but the way they pass off operations to
sub-systems mirrors that of the document. For example, AttrValidator will
linearly proceed through elements, and on each element will use AttrDef to
validate those contents. From there, the attribute might have more
sub-components, which have execution passed off accordingly.

In fact, each strategy handles a very specific class of "error."

RemoveForeignElements   - element tokens
MakeWellFormed          - element token ordering
FixNesting              - element token ordering
ValidateAttributes      - attributes of elements

The crucial point is that while we care about the hierarchy governing these
different errors, we *don't* care about any other information about what actually
happens to the elements. This brings up another point: if HTML Purifier fixes
something, this is not really a notice/warning/error; it's really a suggestion
of a way to fix the aforementioned defects.

In short, the refactoring to take this into account kinda sucks.

Errors should not be recorded in order that they are reported. Instead, they
should be bound to the line (and preferably element) in which they were found.
This means we need some way to uniquely identify every element in the document,
which doesn't presently exist. An easy way of adding this would be to track
line columns. An important ramification of this is that we *must* use the
DirectLex implementation.

    1. Implement column numbers for DirectLex [DONE!]
    2. Disable error collection when not using DirectLex [DONE!]

Next, we need to re-orient all of the error declarations to place CurrentToken
at utmost important. Since this is passed via Context, it's not always clear
if that's available. ErrorCollector should complain HARD if it isn't available.
There are some locations when we don't have a token available. These include:

    * Lexing - this can actually have a row and column, but NOT correspond to
      a token
    * End of document errors - bump this to the end

Actually, we *don't* have to complain if CurrentToken isn't available; we just
set it as a document-wide error. And actually, nothing needs to be done here.

Something interesting to consider is whether or not we care about the locations
of attributes and CSS properties, i.e. the sub-objects that compose these things.
In terms of consistency, at the very least attributes should have column/line
numbers attached to them. However, this may be overkill, as attributes are
uniquely identifiable. You could go even further, with CSS, but they are also
uniquely identifiable.

Bottom-line is, however, this information must be available, in form of the
CurrentAttribute and CurrentCssProperty (theoretical) context variables, and
it must be used to organize the errors that the sub-processes may throw.
There is also a hierarchy of sorts that may make merging this into one context
variable more sense, if it hadn't been for HTML's reasonably rigid structure.
A CSS property will never contain an HTML attribute. So we won't ever get
recursive relations, and having multiple depths won't ever make sense. Leave
this be.

We already have this information, and consequently, using start and end is
*unnecessary*, so long as the context variables are set appropriately. We don't
care if an error was thrown by an attribute transform or an attribute definition;
to the end user these are the same (for a developer, they are different, but
they're better off with a stack trace (which we should add support for) in such
cases).

    3. Remove start()/end() code. Don't get rid of recursion, though [DONE]
    4. Setup ErrorCollector to use context information to setup hierarchies.
       This may require a different internal format. Use objects if it gets
       complex. [DONE]

       ASIDE
            More on this topic: since we are now binding errors to lines
            and columns, a particular error can have three relationships to that
            specific location:

            1. The token at that location directly
                RemoveForeignElements
                AttrValidator (transforms)
                MakeWellFormed
            2. A "component" of that token (i.e. attribute)
                AttrValidator (removals)
            3. A modification to that node (i.e. contents from start to end
               token) as a whole
                FixNesting

            This needs to be marked accordingly. In the presentation, it might
            make sense keep (3) separate, have (2) a sublist of (1). (1) can
            be a closing tag, in which case (3) makes no sense at all, OR it
            should be related with its opening tag (this may not necessarily
            be possible before MakeWellFormed is run).

            So, the line and column counts as our identifier, so:

            $errors[$line][$col] = ...

            Then, we need to identify case 1, 2 or 3. They are identified as
            such:

            1. Need some sort of semaphore in RemoveForeignElements, etc.
            2. If CurrentAttr/CurrentCssProperty is non-null
            3. Default (FixNesting, MakeWellFormed)

            One consideration about (1) is that it usually is actually a
            (3) modification, but we have no way of knowing about that because
            of various optimizations. However, they can probably be treated
            the same. The other difficulty is that (3) is never a line and
            column; rather, it is a range (i.e. a duple) and telling the user
            the very start of the range may confuse them. For example,

            <b>Foo<div>bar</div></b>
            ^     ^

            The node being operated on is <b>, so the error would be assigned
            to the first caret, with a "node reorganized" error. Then, the
            ChildDef would have submitted its own suggestions and errors with
            regard to what's going in the internals.  So I suppose this is
            ok. :-)

            Now, the structure of the earlier mentioned ... would be something
            like this:

            object {
                type = (token|attr|property),
                value, // appropriate for type
                errors => array(),
                sub-errors = [recursive],
            }

            This helps us keep things agnostic. It is also sufficiently complex
            enough to warrant an object.

So, more wanking about the object format is in order. The way HTML Purifier is
currently setup, the only possible hierarchy is:

    token -> attr -> css property

These relations do not exist all of the time; a comment or end token would not
ever have any attributes, and non-style attributes would never have CSS properties
associated with them.

I believe that it is worth supporting multiple paths. At some point, we might
have a hierarchy like:

    * -> syntax
      -> token -> attr -> css property
                       -> url
               -> css stylesheet <style>

et cetera. Now, one of the practical implications of this is that every "node"
on our tree is well-defined, so in theory it should be possible to either 1.
create a separate class for each error struct, or 2. embed this information
directly into HTML Purifier's token stream.  Embedding the information in the
token stream is not a terribly good idea, since tokens can be removed, etc.
So that leaves us with 1... and if we use a generic interface we can cut down
on a lot of code we might need. So let's leave it like this.

~~~~

Then we setup suggestions.

    5. Setup a separate error class which tells the user any modifications
       HTML Purifier made.

Some information about this:

Our current paradigm is to tell the user what HTML Purifier did to the HTML.
This is the most natural mode of operation, since that's what HTML Purifier
is all about; it was not meant to be a validator.

However, most other people have experience dealing with a validator. In cases
where HTML Purifier unambiguously does the right thing, simply giving the user
the correct version isn't a bad idea, but problems arise when:

- The user has such bad HTML we do something odd, when we should have just
  flagged the HTML as an error. Such examples are when we do things like
  remove text from directly inside a <table> tag. It was probably meant to
  be in a <td> tag or be outside the table, but we're not smart enough to
  realize this so we just remove it. In such a case, we should tell the user
  that there was foreign data in the table, but then we shouldn't "demand"
  the user remove the data; it's more of a "here's a possible way of
  rectifying the problem"

- Giving line context for input is hard enough, but feasible; giving output
  line context will be extremely difficult due to shifting lines; we'd probably
  have to track what the tokens are and then find the appropriate out context
  and it's not guaranteed to work etc etc etc.

````````````

Don't forget to spruce up output.

    6. Output needs to automatically give line and column numbers, basically
       "at line" on steroids. Look at W3C's output; it's ok. [PARTIALLY DONE]

       - We need a standard CSS to apply (check demo.css for some starting
         styling; some buttons would also be hip)

    vim: et sw=4 sts=4