RE: Comments on WebArch

Jonathan Marsh wrote:

> There are analogous situations - for instance, I can open an XML
> document, stream it in, successfully process the information I find
> early in the file, and not report that 1Mb down in the file there is a
> well-formedness error.  The document is not well-formed, but a
> particular processor may not be able to detect and report the error.

Funnily enough i hit this very issue only yesterday. I had to process
a set of very large XML documents in which i was only interested in a
single element at the top of the file. The cost of processing the whole 
document would have been prohibitive, and anyway i only cared if my 
fragment of each document was well formed.

I guess there *are* cases where a defence of Postel's Law is useful :^)

Paul

-- 
Paul Sumner Downey
Web Services Integration
BT Exact