Re: Error and Fatal Error

From: Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
To: Joe Fawcett <joefawcett@hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:09:20 +0100

Play the video

It's a bane to developers that parsers regard errors in XML

as fatal which need not be fatal, IMO.

e.g. the .NET parser causes me grief when code falls over

because of illegal characters and the only thing I can find to

do is to recover from the error by catching it with its line

number and using that to find and replace the illegal character

with the respective escape sequence. It would be better, I

think, if the XML spec instructed parsers to fail such that

such characters could still be replaced without there being

any kind of exception beforehand. That's my opinion because

once an exception has occurred the state of the parser isn't

as safe as you'd really like it to be.

see my blog post about this http://stephengreenxml.blogspot.com/2011/03/xml-special-character-gotchas.html

So it would be better for future versions of XML (influenced

perhaps by recent discussion related to MicroXML on this list)

if the specs gave less of a push towards parsers regarding

errors as fatal. That is my opinion but I think is an opinion

of more and more others (or more and more frequently

expressed anyway).

----

Stephen D Green

On 16 July 2011 16:47, Joe Fawcett <joefawcett@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear List Members

I'm writing a short introduction to XML and would like to have a good example of each of the above that doesn't require too much background knowledge. So far I've covered the basics of a well-formed document, creating elements and attributes. I've shied away from the intricacies of DTDs as they are covered in a separate article. Namespaces are also to be covered later so any examples would preferably be unrelated to either of these two areas.

According to the XML specification a processor may recover from an error that's not described as fatal although in my experience most parsers don't try to do this, would I be wrong here? - and if so what would an example be for something like Saxon or one of the netter known parsers?

Thanks

Joe

Follow-Ups:
- Re: Error and Fatal Error
  - From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Re: Error and Fatal Error
  - From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>

References:
- Error and Fatal Error
  - From: Joe Fawcett <joefawcett@hotmail.com>

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