Re: [xml-dev] Error and Fatal Error

[Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

Absolutely.

 

I hunted around the .Net framework hoping to find such

a parser which allowed me to repair the XML but I couldn't

find one. I suspect the makers want all their XML parsers

to be able to claim conformance and that this forces the

parser to be written such that it fails with invalid content,

etc. Maybe a repair kit parser would have to bear a risk

of being labelled 'non-conforming' and so there isn't one.

 

Thus the spec writers maybe have to carry some

responsibility for the lack of such tools and maybe are

best placed to fix it in the future.

----

Stephen D Green

On 16 July 2011 18:03, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

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

_______________________________________________________________________

XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS
to support XML implementation and development. To minimize
spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting.

[Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/
Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org
subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.org
List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php