Recycled Knowledge

At the summer camp I attended as a yoot in the 60s, there was a game known as Mass Soccer. The chief feature of this game of games was that any number could play on either side. Kids being what they are, this meant that the entire center of the field was occupied by a permanent clot of forwards of all shapes and sizes, with a relative handful of backs whose chief task was to assist the goalies when a ball occasionally escaped from this huge scrum.

To keep things interesting, any number of balls could be in play at once. To keep things fair, each side was entitled to as many goalies as there were balls — when a ball went out of play, one of the goalies would do the usual thing to bring it back in while the game raged on around him. To keep things safe, the footwear rules were strictly enforced: no shoes allowed, socks required.

It was a hell of a lot of fun.

TagSoup is a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short. TagSoup is designed for people who have to process this stuff using some semblance of a rational application design. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML. TagSoup also includes a command-line processor that reads HTML files and can generate either clean HTML or well-formed XML that is a close approximation to XHTML.
TagSoup is free and Open Source software, licensed under the Academic Free License version 3.0, a cleaned-up and patent-safe BSD-style license which allows proprietary re-use. It's also licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0, since unfortunately the GPL and the AFL are incompatible. You can choose to license TagSoup from me under either the GPL or the AFL.
This release represents the end of my current plans for TagSoup. I will continue to fix bugs, but it now does everything that I foresaw back in 2002 when I started this project, and a great deal more. Thanks to everyone on the tagsoup-friends mailing list for their efforts.