Re: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From Rick Jelliffe:
>No, they chose to penalize everyone else's XML systems. If that IE
>parser accepts something and Oracle's correctly finds the error,
>are the punters supposed to know that MS messed up and Oracle is
correct?

 From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
> Should notepad.exe also alert users to anything that might fail in
>Oracle or MSXML3?  When someone loads the invalid file in MSXML3, it
>bombs -- does the user say "Notepad let me parse that file!  Who is
>right, Microsoft or Microsoft?!?"

Whoever tells the user/agent "there is a problem" is right, even if it is Oracle
or Sun or IBM or Apache or one of the free tools.  An editor is a tool
for correcting mistakes; a browser does not provide any mechanism
for correction, so the correct action of a browser (and a parser, in its
default mode) is to reject the file.

I have no objection to parsers having funny modes to allow repair
tools to be created. But it is hard to know what the appropriate repair
should be if an ENQ is plonked in the middle of a file: stripping it?
No, better to fail and make the creator's problem, not the recipient's.

If MS wants a different behaviour, have they raised this and argued it
through the W3C process?  There might be other people who agree
that we should refactor the various errors in XML into something
other than "well-formed" and "valid".  It is certainly an issue that 
involves trade-offs; but not unilateral acceptance of illegal XML 
documents w

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe