Re: Error handling: yes, I did mean it

At 11:00 PM 4/23/97, Sarah Slocombe wrote:

>At 09:41 AM 23/04/97 -0400, Dave Petersen wrote:
                                       ^^^         (...son; I'm of Swedish
                                                    decent.  ;-)  )
>...

>As I understand it, Tim's proposal restricts only PARSER behaviour, not all
>XML applications and in that light, I support it whole-heartedly. Indeed,
>James' assertion gives me confidence that level-headed tools developers
>such as he will take the spec as a starting point rather than a final goal.

A pure "parser" is *never* used alone.  So to say that the "parser" may
not do a certain something with incoming data, but may pass that raw data
on to the (coupled) application, which is permitted to do something that
is more easily done in that portion of the system called the parser, is
specious.  We should not be dictating the internal makeup of a system.
(As foolish as dictating the internal representation of characters within
a system....)

It's quite reasonable to say that an XML parser *must* provide
an error message saying the incoming data is flawed, not (correct) XML.
And even that the XML "system" *must* pass that error message to the
user.  My objection is to words and phrases that seem to say "and the
parser must not do anything else with erroneous data".

I certainly agree that we should not say that an XML parser *must*
do more than present an error message when presented with flawed data.
That's different.

Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@acm.org

Received on Thursday, 24 April 1997 11:12:09 UTC