Re: XML5: Re: [xml-dev] MicroXML

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Wed, 2010-12-15 at 20:24 -0800, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> To the extent there are people who like Namespaces but who consider
> Draconian behavior a disadvantage for XML, making XML processing
> non-Draconian would give them Namespaces together non-Draconian
> behavior without putting xmlns into HTML. That is, I think Namespaces
> are bad and Draconian error handling is bad, so to make a combination
> that has Namespaces but not Draconian error handling, I think it makes
> more sense to remove one bad thing (Draconian error handling) from XML
> than to add a bad thing (xmlns syntax) to HTML.

Well, this is why I wrote my "unobtrusive namespaces" proposal, to
reduce the syntactic objections. It doesn't address any complaints
about browser APIs and namespaces though.

The XML specification forbids a parser from saying something was XML
if it wasn't. But it doesn't require a "yellow screen of death" and
never has. Error correction is perfectly OK as long as the API
provides a way for the application to determine that the input was
not well-formed XML.

So, you don't need to call it a new version of XML, and you don't need
a new version of XML. E.g. have a required callback for well-formedness
errors, that can return TRY_TO_FIX or GIVE_UP_NOW, and all is well.

(One could argue it's a bug in APache, IIS, etc. to label something as
XML if it's not well-formed; certainly it's in violation of the HTTP
spec, but the Web has always been a bit loose with such things :-) )

For the special case of RSS, I think it'd be better to say that RSS is not
in fact regular XML ,and needs an RSS parser (sadly).

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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