Re: line number problem

It's a reasonable point. I know however that the first thing I do when
I get a validation error on a page is "view source" and figure out
what's going on, which will confuse people. But as you say, we have
the chance to refer to a location in a pretty-printed version which
may be more helpful -- or even to a tidied version.

I'm cool with this approach as long as there's an understanding that
tools will need to show the copy of the doc to which it's referring.
Presumably the snippets of code we present help locate the error too
regardless of line numbers.

Sean

On 7/13/07, Jo Rabin <jrabin@mtld.mobi> wrote:
> It may be a slightly abstract, or abstruse, point but I think we should
> be clear that when we are reporting an error, it is indeed against the
> moki document's copy and not "the original".
>
> We shouldn't get too hung up on this but the point is presumably that
> there may be "no such document" as the original, since it may be
> dynamically generated and the "line number" may not be very interesting
> from that point of view. Indeed, in a number of cases it will be "1" -
> i.e. the original document is serialised as a character stream without
> formatting - it's kind of what we recommend under MINIMIZE, after all.
>
> Or to put it another way, the line number fulfils a secondary and not a
> primary purpose. The point of it being there is to assist in the primary
> purpose which is help a human find out what we are moaning about in the
> results.
>
> So fwiw, I would be happy with reporting the line number relative to the
> serialised moki copy and have error reporting tools do syntax
> highlighting, or whatever, on that. From that pov an XPath expression
> might even actually be more use. At least I think we should consider
> putting it in.
>
> Jo

Received on Friday, 13 July 2007 13:23:14 UTC