[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Revisiting the original XML deliberations - was Re: Postel's l
On Jan 16, 2004, at 5:17 PM, jcowan@r... wrote: >> 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? > > One reason is the existence of a settlement process. It's cheaper, > quite > often, to assume all is well, watch for exceptions further down, and > correct > them by hand. A recent nuke in the Atomic war :-) over this issue in the Atom community linked to the W3C SGML WG thread where this issue was apparently aired for the first time back in early 1997. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-sgml-wg/1997Apr/0164.html began it all, apparently. One post I found particularly intriguing in hindsight was from Paul Prescod http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-sgml-wg/1997May/0074.html "Browsers do not just need a well-formed XML document. They need a well-formed XML document with a stylesheet in a known location that is syntactically correct and *semantically correct* (actually applies reasonable styles to the elements so that the document can be read). They need valid hyperlinks to valid targets .... There is still so much room for a document author to screw up that well-formedness is a very minor step down the path. The idea that well-formedness-or-die will create a "culture of quality" on the Web is totally bogus. People will become extremely anal about their well-formedness and transfer their laziness to some other part of the system. I' m not at all sure that the 2004 edition of Paul Prescod would agree, but the idea that well-formedness is a particularly useful indication that a document is "correct in content" seems a bit, well "bogus". There's a lot to more "validity" in the real-world sense of the word than well-formedness or even validity against an XML schema, even in something as simple as a typical Web document let alone a business document with legal and financial ramifications. Most likely, some "settlement process" is needed for a wide range of errors, and well-formedness is just the most easily detected. I do think we in the XML world need to be careful not to overstate the benefits of well-formedness even if we do insist that it is intrinsic to the formal definition of what "XML" means. One could of course argue that it is an indicator of non-"laziness". Is there much evidence to support this? Does a working knowledge of the corner cases in the XML spec (or the ability to choose software that handles them properly) really correlate with overall document quality/validity, in people's experience? "
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