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RE: Validation vs performance - was Re: Fasttext out

• To: "Alessandro Triglia" <sandro@m...>
• Subject: RE: Validation vs performance - was Re: Fasttext output from SAX?
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 14:46:16 -0400
• Cc: "'XML DEV'" <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <!~!AAAAADXdF265nb5NjLmX+2QcDNzEx0wA@m...>
• References: <!~!AAAAADXdF265nb5NjLmX+2QcDNzEx0wA@m...>

At 6:20 PM -0400 4/19/04, Alessandro Triglia wrote:

>If you expect an attribute "age", will you accept an attribute "Age"
>instead?
>
>If you expect an attribute "age", will you accept a child element <age>
>instead?
>
>If you expect an attribute "abc:age", will you accept an attribute "age"
>(unqualified) instead?
>
>If you expect two child elements <a> and <b>, will you accept a <c> in
>between?  What if you have a <d> before the <a> but the mandatory element
><b> is missing altogether?  Will you accept and know how to handle this
>situation?
>
>Will you accept a namespace name "abcde" when a schema specifies the
>namespace name "abcdef", or "abcdef/", or "ABCDE"?
>
>Are you saying that it has become a common idioma in application development
>to expect and accept one or more of the above?  I cannot believe you really
>mean that.

I won't speak for Stephen, but depending on external context, I might 
accept any or all of those. The first task for a robust system is to 
see what you've got and match it up against what you expect. If it 
doesn't match, then toss it off to a human, and have them look at it. 
If it's obvious what was intended, then add the necessary chunk to 
your processing software to handle the modified format. I'm not sure 
what to call this idiom--Extreme Input?--but it works. The first 
couple of weeks you try it, you're going to be writing a lot of 
custom code, but it tends to rapidly settle into a steady state with 
new formats encountered only very occasionally.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

• References:
  • RE: Validation vs performance - was Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: "Alessandro Triglia" <sandro@m...>

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