Re: [xml-dev] Error and Fatal Error

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 16/07/2011 17:09, Stephen D Green wrote:
> It's a bane to developers that parsers regard errors in XML
> as fatal which need not be fatal, IMO.
>

I think it's excellent that XML parsers by default reject ill-formed 
XML; it strongly encourages people to generate well-formed XML and 
prevents the kind of arms-race that we've seen in HTML where there's so 
much ill-formed HTML around that it's now considered quite acceptable 
and is becoming standardized. One reason for this is that if nothing is 
considered invalid, then real errors can never be detected.

However, I don't see why people shouldn't attempt to write XML repair 
tools that repair ill-formed XML and turn it into well-formed XML - so 
long as it's accepted that such tools should only be used where there is 
a specific need to repair corrupt data, and not for routine XML parsing.

Michael Kay
Saxonica