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RE: Postel's law, exceptions

• To: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@m...>,"Michael Champion" <mc@x...>
• Subject: RE: Postel's law, exceptions
• From: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@v...>
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:25:21 +0100
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <p06010202bc2c7ce1a5ac@[192.168.254.4]>

> I don't believe that requiring well-formed XML is unrealistic in the
> least. Why do people find it unreasonable to produce well-formed XML?
> Are authors really hand-authoring RSS? I'm certainly not, and I
> suspect the thousands using various blogging tools aren't either.

Many of the current generation of blogging tools make it relatively easy to
generate non-XML feeds. What's worse is that most days it may be valid, then
on the day you don't test you paste in some inappropriate chars.

> The only possible problem I see is if the RSS/Atom is produced by
> screen scraping hand-authored HTML. But this is only a problem if the
> tools that do the screen scraping assume the HTML is well-formed and
> basically just copy and paste it, which is of course insane, broken,
> and brain-damaged. Are the authoring tools really that stupid? (I
> honestly don't know. I've only used the tools I've written.)

Try some of the tools. Most give the user plenty of freedom to produce
ill-formed markup.

> It is only sensible that a screen scraper should fix HTML using
> something like Tidy before including it in an XML document. This is
> perfectly OK. Data from non-XML source such as HTML documents, Word
> files, and SQL databases is included in XML documents all the time;
> and this is the appropriate time to make any fixes that are necessary
> to create well-formedness. However, once a document has been labelled
> as XML, it is no longer acceptable for downstream processes to make
> such fixes in it. It's just too hard to figure out what's missing,
> and correctly repair it,

But many of them clients don't care if it's XML or not, just as long as
there are pointy-brackets here and there.

>The proper response is to drop the document,
> and perhaps kick back an error to its publisher.

Quite.

Cheers,
Danny.

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