RE: [xml-dev] Nested Documents (was: XML 2.0)

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

 > Doesn't seem like a good tradeoff just to read logfiles, especially when there's already work-arounds (which don't make the world catch on fire). 

 

I don't see how you can tell what's a good tradeoff without knowing anything about the cost of development or the cost of failure, which are both highly variable by project.

 

The right tradeoff for me on a couple of projects has been to use the workaround where log entries are added to a file containing a sequence of elements with no outer wrapper, and that file is read by referencing it as an external entity inside a document entity that serves merely to add the wrapper. That gives me as much reliability as I need (which on these projects is not that much) and more development inconvenience than I want. I could get the same level of reliability without the inconvenience if the spec allowed me to parse the unwrapped-list-of-elements directly - so the restriction in the spec is buying me nothing, therefore it can't be a good trade-off.

 

In any case, if the process writing the file fails with a disk-full error, and I want the system to be resilient to this, then surely I should deal with the disk-full exception, rather than by assuming that the failure will leave the file in an unreadable state?

 

Michael Kay

http://www.saxonica.com/