- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 14:44:05 -0500
- To: www-amaya@w3.org
- CC: chris@w3.org
I'm using Amaya more and more, so I find it increasingly difficult to accept claims such as: [[[ II.7. What is the reason for a very liberal structure enforcement? Amaya has to cope with existing Web pages [...] ]]] -- Amaya FAQ http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/FAQ.html#What Wed, 12 Jul 2000 10:02:45 GMT It's clear that Amaya doesn't cope with all existing Web pages. It crashes more than occasionally. That's completely understandable; I don't encourage spending development effort trying to make sense of erroneous Web pages. But what I'm really concerned about is: "[...] We [...] decided that Amaya should try to fix bugs, but without losing information." Clearly that's impossible. You're losing information about the former (possibly illegal/unsupported) syntax of the document. It's perhaps useful to attempt certain huristic fixes, but not without the informed consent of the user. I would suggest: (a) When you load a document, use an XML processor. If you detect a well-formedness error or if you detect an element/attribute structure problem: (a1) display some "bad markup" icon in the UI (a2) call tidy to clean up the document. (a3) start over with the results from tidy, keeping track of the fact that you've tidied the input (be careful not to loop; the tidied output might still not be acceptable to Amaya) (b) if the user starts to edit (i.e. when you set the "dirty" flag and, e.g. change the save icon from grey to active), if you're working with tidied input, prompt the user with a modal dialog ala: This document had markup errors. Amaya has attempted to correct the errors, but there is no guarantee that the corrections are as you intended. You may want to review the source of the document. <Cancel edit> <OK> This approach has two benefits: (1) users are informed when Amaya changes their documents (2) Amaya developers can stop worrying about buggy documents, and leave all error recovery issues to tidy. If you want to deal with valid HTML 4.0 documents (i.e. valid SGML documents) in (a), very well, but there are so few of them them that frankly, I wouldn't bother if I were you. But since Amaya itself can produce valid HTML 4.0, perhaps it's worth supporting for a time. Also, regarding integrity, please re-consider my earlier request to limit (to a few minutes or so) the amount of my work that Amaya can lose by crashing auto-save periodically, not just at crash time Dan Connolly (Fri, Mar 10 2000) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-amaya/2000JanMar/0282.html -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Monday, 28 August 2000 15:44:47 UTC