Python html5lib Skipped Elements

By  on  

I've been working on some interesting python stuff at Mozilla and one task recently called for called for rending a page and then finding elements with a URL attribute value (like img[src] or a[href]) and ensuring they become absolute URLs.  One problem I encountered when using html5lib was that LINK and IMG elements were being skipped when I tokenized the HTML.  After browsing through the html5lib source code, I found a variable called voidElements which included both LINK and IMAGE:

voidElements = frozenset((
    "base",
    "command",
    "event-source",
    "link",
    "meta",
    "hr",
    "br",
    "img",
    "embed",
    "param",
    "area",
    "col",
    "input",
    "source"
))

When I commented out those two elements, they were found upon next run of my routine, meaning their presence in the set were causing me problems.  Here's how I skirted the issue:

new_void_set = set()
for item in html5lib_constants.voidElements:
	new_void_set.add(item)
new_void_set.remove('link')
new_void_set.remove('img')
html5lib_constants.voidElements = frozenset(new_void_set)

Since voidElements is a frozenset, I couldn't simply remove LINK and IMG, so I needed to create a new frozenset without those elements.  Let me know if there's a more python-ish way of creating this frozen set.  In an event, delving into the deep recesses of html5lib paid off and I accomplished the goal!

Recent Features

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Unicode CSS Classes

    CSS class name structure and consistency is really important; some developers camelcase classnames, others use dashes, and others use underscores.  One thing I've learned when toying around by HTML and CSS class names is that you can actually use unicode symbols and icons as classnames.

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos IV

    Did you know you can triple-heart things on CodePen? We’ve had that little not-so-hidden feature forever. You can click that little heart button on any Pen (or Project, Collection, or Post) on CodePen to show the creator a little love, but you can click it again...

Discussion

  1. You could use list comprehension to filter the elements instead; something like:

    html5lib_constants.voidElements = frozenset([e for e in html5lib_constants.voidElements if e not in [“link”, “img”]])

    Sounds like it would be useful to add void element overriding as a feature to the library in the future, though.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!