Re: [xml-dev] Re: XML5

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

On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 15:53 -0800, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2010, at 09:29, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I think it's clear that that's not what the spec intends to say,
The XML spec is careful not to talk about documents that are not
well-formed; once a document has been determined not to be well-formed,
the *only* thing the XML spec can say about them is that you
can't claim they *are* well-formed.

It's a hole through which a moderately large truck could be driven.

> although the letter of the spec can be met if you creatively interpret
> "MUST NOT continue to pass character data and information about the
> document's logical structure to the application in the normal way" to
> be met if you switch from the normal SAX ContentHandler interface over
> to an identical set of callbacks under, say, an interface called
> BrokenContentHandler.
I would indeed consider that to meet the letter of the spec.

The intent was to try to avoid the need for this sort of shenanigan in
XML parsers by encouraging authors to make well-formed XML in the
first place.  *Outside* of the Web browser world, it largely worked.

[...]

> > So, you don't need to call it a new version of XML, and you don't need
> > a new version of XML.
> 
> I'd be fine with describing XML5 as a new parsing spec for XML 1.0 and
> not a new version of the language itself.

Better, call it a new library for handling malformed XML, in the spirit
of HTML Tidy.

I would not want to imply that software in other situations needs to
process broken XML documents.

What sort of XML document, other than RSS or XHTML, do you encounter
that leads to wanting/needing this?  An XML editor is one good and
obvious example, as if the editor can't load the document, the
author might have a hard time fixing the problem.

Liam

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