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I would be much more interested in any innovation that allowed a parser
to report more that one well-formedness error in a single run.
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@ntlworld.com
work: Michael.Kay@softwareag.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> Sent: 05 April 2003 15:24
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Cc: Laurent Bihanic
> Subject: [xml-dev] Partial documents in tree-based APIs
>
>
> 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/ |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
>
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