RE: Streaming and Well-Formedness

> And the unknowable philosophical question is: "before you see 
> the end tag, 
> do you even have an Infoset in which to look for an mU 
> attribute?"   I 
> don't think that either Infoset or SOAP says much about this.

True, but the XML Rec says a lot about it; only well-formed data
objects are XML documents.

>   I think 
> most SAX applications act as if you can start to extract 
> information from 
> a partially parsed document.  So, I can see this one either 
> way.  As a 
> practical matter I would side with Marc (as opposed to Mark) on this.

Hey, I'd like to agree with Marc too! 8-)  I'm a big believer in the
principle of being liberal in what you accept.  But unfortunately, XML's
deterministic failure model dramatically reduces ones ability to be so.
There's no way to get around this, AFAIK, short of developing a new
extensible markup language - but it wouldn't be XML.

> What worries me more is streaming request/response, which may 
> be a use 
> case that doesn't make the 80/20 cut.  Let's say I want to define an 
> "uppercase this string" service, which returns some body string in 
> uppercase.  If the string is 1GByte long, it would be nice to 
> stream the 
> response while the request is coming in, and indeed deadlock 
> avoidance may 
> require it.  If the input later proves to be not-well-formed, 
> how do you 
> reflect the fault?

"</env:evnelope">" on the response, of course! 8-)  I'm only
half-kidding.  Think about it.  P-)

MB

Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2003 15:28:56 UTC