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RE: SAX2: Parser interface

• From: Miles Sabin <msabin@c...>
• To: David Megginson <david@m...>, XMLDev list <xml-dev-digest@i...>
• Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 11:51:04 -0000

David Megginson wrote,
> Miles Sabin writes:
> > [snip: query about Parser.setLocale()]
>
> Error reporting.

OK, I've slept on this and, although I can see there's a case
to be made for it, I'm not convinced.

Many software modules need to do error reporting of some sort
or another. Typically they'll simply use the platform default
Locale for localization rather than allowing it to be
configurable. That's the right thing to do, because error 
messages are normally delivered locally, and the rare cases
where they're not aren't enough to justify adding setLocale()
methods to an interface (cp. pretty much all the standard
java.*.* classes, eg. java.util.HashMap).

I'm not convinced that an XML parser is special in this
respect, so I don't think org.xml.sax.Parser should have this
method. For the most part error messages will be delivered
locally, so the platform default Locale is fine. And in the
cases where error messages are delivered non-locally (ie.
an XML parser as part of a web application which delivers
errors to a remote user) the non-local Locale probably won't
be available _anyway_ ... we might have a character encoding
or language preference (via HTTP's Accept-Charset: and Accept-
Language:) but there's no defined mapping from those 
preferences to a Locale. Worse still, there's no defined
mapping from a Locale to a preferred character encoding, so
a configured Locale wouldn't help all that much anyway.

Cheers,


Miles

-- 
Miles Sabin                       Cromwell Media
Internet Systems Architect        5/6 Glenthorne Mews
+44 (0)20 8817 4030               London, W6 0LJ, England
msabin@c...          http://www.cromwellmedia.com/

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