Re: ERB votes on error handling

> Assuming that you are stream-based, the processor might see two stories,
>> and an illegal end tag.
>
>But according to the XML spec, 
>
>  "There is exactly one element, called the root, for which neither the
>  start-tag nor the end-tag is in the context of any other element."

It might also interpret the stream as 2 documents... depending on how
the storage/entity manager and parser works.

>It seems to me, that any streams-based application can not use XML
>unless it is encapsulated in yet another protocol wrapper. Sad that
>otherwise simple applications must be so complicated.

Not really. Almost everything has an application protocol on top
of raw streams.

>> This is not a good example though. Obviously you cannot hope to tune into
>> a stream of structured information in the middle without some necessity
>> for synchronization (jump to the middle of a frame of MPEG data, and see
>> what you get).
>
>Why not? I do it all the time with TV, radio, movies, theater, etc. These
>are all "structured information" but at present require a human to make 
>sense of the structure. (We all recognize commercials, credits, etc.)

You do not jump in half way through a frame of video. I would consider
radio waves to be either unstructured or self-synchronising.

>> This is particularly interesting to me, because I have a proposal for
>> exactly what you outline above: realtime delivery of HTML and XML. An 
>> application built using my proposal would not suffer from the above
>> problem.
>
>I believe it is possible to build such a system - if you avoid XML or
>needlessly complicate it by encapsulating it in another protocol layer.
>The draconian model either precludes certain applications or makes them
>more difficult than they need to be. And for no obvious advantage.

I would argue that they very synchonous nature of XML is a a key
point in it's favor.

Received on Thursday, 8 May 1997 09:34:11 UTC