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RE: Postel's law, exceptions

• To: "'W. E. Perry'" <wperry@f...>, "'XML DEV'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Postel's law, exceptions
• From: "Bob Wyman" <bob@w...>
• Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 16:36:49 -0500
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <40082C96.C8F8AC39@f...>
• Reply-to: <bob@w...>

Walter Perry wrote:
> We do, however, make transactions between the true 
> principal parties possible by presenting the substance 
> of each side of the transaction in a form (well-formed XML!)
> which the principal parties can rely on to be parseable
	Nice post. Even though it wasn't well formed according to the
rules written English, I believe I understood most of it. (Note: You
wrote: "the question of of liberality") :-)
	But, I still have a question. Your service would seem to be
doing what Tim Bray in a recent note suggested should *not* be done.
i.e. you're taking banking-like data and "fixing it" by making it
well-formed. The problem, of course, is that in doing so, you could be
making something look "good" when in fact, it might simply be an error
and *should* be ignored by everyone except the originating source. 
	Given the desperate need to ensure that documents that
describe potentially high-priced financial instruments are correct in
their content, why doesn't it make more sense for you to kick back the
badly formed documents to their source and ask for clean versions?
	Also, do you only guarantee that your documents will be
"parseable" or do you also clean up non-conformance to schemas? For
instance, if you saw a date in the form "1 January 2005" yet known
specifications indicated that the expected form was "1Jan2005", would
you "repair" the non-conforming date? If so, can you define any
particular level of repair that you are not willing to attempt?

		bob wyman

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