- From: Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:36:20 -0500
- To: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Cc: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>, public-html@w3.org, public-xml-core-wg@w3.org
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 08:26:16PM +0100, Lachlan Hunt wrote: > Liam Quin wrote: >> To amplify a little... the XML Spec says (in essence) >> that software that takes something (anything at all) >> that is not well-formed XML, can turn it into XML, but, >> if it does, it must not claim that the original input >> was XML. > > If that is really the case, then that is a problem because of the lack > of defined error recovery behaviour. No, not at all. The standard XML behaviour is that if it's got well-formedness errors in it, it's not XML. It's a fatal error to try and process such "document" as XML. But that doesn't mean you can't fix the error. > If applications were simply free > to conclude that the document isn't XML and then do whatever they want > with it (other than just aborting), that leads to a serious lack of > interoperability. They are free to do *almost* whatever they want -- they can't claim it was well-formed XML. > It's the situation we're already in with feeds, and > it's a serious issue that needs to be resolved. No, not at all. There, people continue to say, "it's a feed". But (for example) there would be nothing wrong with a feed aggregator that marked feeds as containing errors, but processed (included/displayed) them anyway. We have *excellent* interoperability in most of the XML world. Of course, "most" is a hard term to define -- RSS represents a small fraction of total XML in the world if you include Web services and xml-rpc, for example... Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
Received on Tuesday, 17 November 2009 19:36:32 UTC