Re: XML namespaces on the Web

On 11/18/09 4:46 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> One should think that A) browser vendors could have a look at the
> countless non-fatal errors an make sure that they are not treated as
> fatal. And B) that they could be Opera friendly instead of Firefox
> draconian w.r.t. fatal errors.

Just so we're clear, the Firefox behavior here is basically a 
consequence on two things:

1)  The XML parser used (expat) just gives up (possibly with data
     buffered in it) when it hits a well-formedness violation.
2)  Gecko does not have a good way to recover the already-parsed
     source text (it may or may not be in the HTTP cache, etc).

Implementing the Safari behavior of not dropping whatever has been 
parsed so far might be doable without too much trouble.  Implementing 
the Opera behavior requires fundamental rearchitecture of the networking 
layer in Gecko, or keeping the source of all XML documents in memory on 
the off chance that the document won't be well-formed.  The former is 
clearly needed anyway, but hasn't happened yet.

So the behavior is not exactly a consequence of "we must be draconian 
about this", as much as it's a consequence of "it would take significant 
architectural changes to handle this edge case, and it's a low 
priority".  Technical issue, not philosophical.

-Boris

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 21:59:44 UTC