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Streaming APIs like SAX and XMLPULL by their nature provide some of
the content of a malformed document to the client application before
the first well-formedness error is detected. The XML specification
implicitly says this is OK, though in some use-cases roll-back or
failure to commit may be desirable.
Now consider the case of a tree-based API such as DOM, JDOM, or XOM
which encounters a malformedness error. Traditionally, these APIs
have reported no information from a malformed document to the client
application. However, recently Laurent Bihanic submitted a patch to
JDOM in which as much of the document as had been able to be
successfully parsed was made available through the exception that was
thrown to indicate the malformedness error. This was quite clever. It
had never occurred to me, and I had never noticed any other API do
anything similar.
What I'd like to get broader discussion of is whether this is a good
idea. There are certainly use cases for it. Bihanic wanted to read
the envelope of an XML message even if the data was malformed.
However, there are also problems. For instance, if the
well-formedness error is a missing end-tag, then the element with the
missing end-tag will still appear in the partial tree. And if the
problem is a missing root element, then this may produce a Document
object with no root element. On the other hand, rollback, failure to
commit, or simply ignoring the malformed document is much easier than
with a streaming API since you know in advance that the document is
malformed.
Is this approach something to be encouraged? Should other tree-based
APIs like XOM and DOM copy this innovation? What advantages and
disadvantages have I not thought of?
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|
