error recovery (was: Charter)

On 15/02/2012 19:57, Norman Walsh wrote:
>    Applications that perform error recovery should provide a mechanism
>    for identifying when recovery was performed on a document.

It may be that "error recovery" turns out the best idiom for aligning 
xml-er with xml 1.x, but it worries me that that should be a given at 
the start, or mentioned in the charter.

I think the most useful way to view the html parser (which is supposed 
to be a motivating example) is not that it does error recovery, just 
that the parse rules are more open than one might have expected, 
resulting in more (in fact in that case, essentially all) input strings 
resulting in a parse tree.

Mostly it's just a matter of terminology but it does have technical 
implications if "error-recovery" ends up meaning "any point at which the 
xml-er parse differs from an xml parse" then if we were to mandate that 
all (or even the first) such difference be reported then either that 
puts constraints on the possible designs of an xml-er parser, that it 
have that information available, or that the system is more or less 
forced to parse with both systems and report if the results are 
different. That last option may well be reasonable but seems to me 
better left as a choice to the application rather than something that we 
should mandate at the xml-er parse level.

David

Received on Friday, 17 February 2012 00:54:22 UTC