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

[John Snelson <john.snelson@oracle.com>]

The argument against having multiple document elements really holds no 
water - you can't tell that XML documents have finished because the 
document element has ended, since there can be an unlimited number of 
significant processing instructions and comments following it. Therefore 
the supposed benefit of using XML with unreliable transports or storage 
mediums is non-existent.

John

Michael Kay wrote:
> 
>  > 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/
> 
> 


-- 
John Snelson, Oracle Corporation            http://snelson.org.uk/john
Berkeley DB XML:        http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/xml
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