Re: [xml-dev] Error and Fatal Error
Mind you, that's not to say we don't all owe a great deal
of thanks to the spec writers for all the good things they
have given th world with XML and XML parsers. Just that
it would be good after all these years if some holes could
be plugged too.
----
Stephen D Green
On 16 July 2011 18:17, Stephen D Green <[email protected]> wrote:
Absolutely.I hunted around the .Net framework hoping to find sucha parser which allowed me to repair the XML but I couldn'tfind one. I suspect the makers want all their XML parsersto be able to claim conformance and that this forces theparser to be written such that it fails with invalid content,etc. Maybe a repair kit parser would have to bear a riskof being labelled 'non-conforming' and so there isn't one.Thus the spec writers maybe have to carry someresponsibility for the lack of such tools and maybe arebest placed to fix it in the future.----Stephen D Green
On 16 July 2011 18:03, Michael Kay <[email protected]> wrote:On 16/07/2011 17:09, Stephen D Green wrote:I think it's excellent that XML parsers by default reject ill-formed XML; it strongly encourages people to generate well-formed XML and prevents the kind of arms-race that we've seen in HTML where there's so much ill-formed HTML around that it's now considered quite acceptable and is becoming standardized. One reason for this is that if nothing is considered invalid, then real errors can never be detected.
It's a bane to developers that parsers regard errors in XML
as fatal which need not be fatal, IMO.
However, I don't see why people shouldn't attempt to write XML repair tools that repair ill-formed XML and turn it into well-formed XML - so long as it's accepted that such tools should only be used where there is a specific need to repair corrupt data, and not for routine XML parsing.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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