Re: XML namespaces on the Web

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