Re: Sudden death: request for missing input

At 4:06 PM -0600 4/28/97, Dave Hollander wrote:
>Q2a: Is it important to have interoperability defined for documents
>	that have errors?

No. It is important to have a universal definition of what is an error. I
think it's also important, as Michael and others have noted, that there is
a mandatory notification of syntactically malformed documents. I think even
a little red flag in the browser window would suffice to make authors check
-- because they know that it looks like they are careless if the flag shows
up...

>Q2b: If so, how do we prevent implementation/market-share wars
>	over emulating error behavior such that XML will not effectively
>	become rewritten by the leading implementations?

1. Reprogram the brains of the entire industry.
2. make sure the vendors must explain that they are interpreting
_erroneous_ documents. It's a feature, but a very different feature from
the current situation in HTML -- where the definition is essentially
irrelevant for practical work.


>A2a: the argument seems to be, don't worry. Since most if not all XML
>	documents will be machine generated they will all be well formed.
>	I don't buy it! Programmers are human to and make as many errors
>	as prose authors.

Sure, and the programmers, like the authors, will have to fix their
incorrect output, to remove error displays from browsers and other
processors.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 1997 00:06:11 UTC