Re: XML namespaces on the Web

Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> If that is really the case, then that is a problem because of the lack
> of defined error recovery behaviour. 

The question is whether there should be such unified error recovery for
XML when it is supposed that XML should be well-formed and it should not
be necessary to fix it. Having unified error recovery will be excuse for
content producers and can lead to producing more and more
non-well-formed content.

> 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.  It's the situation we're already in with feeds, and
> it's a serious issue that needs to be resolved.

The similar situation is with web-browsers and HTML. HTML5 is just draft
and its parsing algorithm is not yet widely deployed. Each browser thus
uses its own error recovery mechanism -- of course they are quite
aligned for many reasons, but not exactly same. If you think that there
should be unified error handling for XHTML content, solution is very
simple -- just take respective parts from XML5 proposal and add them to
HTML5 and say that if UA finds well-formdness error in XHTML content and
it wants to recover from it it must use this specific recovery
algorithm. And you are done and it is not necessary to change single
character in the current XML spec.

				Jirka

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  Jirka Kosek      e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz      http://xmlguru.cz
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