Maybe he read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771057 in Re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771013 ?

Thanks for putting up the link.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html

"Clearly, the benchmarks you see on Ruby Inside are skewed to favor Nokogiri... Why not treat Hpricot fairly and use it properly in the benchmarks? It reeks of something."

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/181699

Further, the benchmarks we republished were not by us, but just a screenshot of benchmarks shared by the creator of Nokogiri.

Was this an interview or something? Was _why alerted to this as a chance to refute the claim by providing his own benchmarks? Could the data even be validated and not easily doctored?

If everyone had to bother validating all the third party bits and pieces that get referenced on blogs, no-one would blog. Blogging is a "hey, check this out, I ain't saying it's true, but you might find it interesting" type of affair - it's not the New York Times (which is why regular journalism is foundering; it's expensive to fact check everything and, heck, it's a Ruby blog, not a trusted source of journalism).

Nokogiri: A Faster, Better HTML and XML Parser for Ruby (than Hpricot) http://www.rubyinside.com/nokogiri-ruby-html-parser-and-xml-...

Upvoted for the explanation, thanks.