RE: Well-formed Blueberry

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 2:02 PM -0400 7/13/01, Frank Richards wrote:

I'm particularly having trouble with what it does to manual editing: Someday there will be doctype in which the only Blueberry names are in optional elements. So then, somebody opens a document in Notepad, deletes a single optional element, saves it, and suddenly it's illegal because it no longer includes the bluberry characters.


I don't think this scenario is all that different from the status quo. Right now my experience of manual editing is that I open up a document, delete an element, save it, post it, and then discover that everything's breaking because my finger slipped and I either:

A. Deleted too much
B. Didn't delete quite enough (I often manage to miss the < on the start tag of the element I'm trying to delete.)

I guess I'm just fumble fingered and not very dexterous with the mouse. However, I don't think my experience is atypical. When manually editing documents I routinely introduce well-formedness errors.If I'm being careful I run the documents through a parser and fix my mistake before posting them. If I'm not, I run them through a parser and fix my mistake after something else breaks. This is really no different, just one more well-formedness constraint for the parser to check.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ 
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      | 
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+