[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Trust and control (as Re: Here's how toprocess X
On Thu, 2013-01-31 at 07:16 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > Somewhere along the line programmers learned that only completely > perfect messages should be accepted. The difficulty has always been two-fold. First, that you have to allow for every variation in the software, as you don't want software to crash or allow execution of arbitrary code accidentally (vulnerabilities). It's interesting to note that the widespread adoption of Intel's 808x little-endian architecture greatly increased vulnerability to stack attacks. Second, that error correction is difficult. Error correction that varies from program to program means interoperability is limited to the subset of data that gets treated the same way everywhere. This is what, for example, HTML 5 is about (partly) - documenting that subset for Web browsers, and trying to broaden it by having the browsers all use the same parsing and error correction techniques for new content. [...] > I could see the value of well-formedness, though I question even that > lately. I don't understand, though, why we regularly insist that the > only information worth processing is that which arrived in pristine > condition. That's a stronger statement than I'd make. If I make a mistake in a program, the chances are that (1) the compiler or interpreter catches it (2) I catch it in my unit tests (3) It's caught in application tests and Q/A (4) A customer complains (5) Everything seems fine until the 'plane tries to land when the wind-speed is less than the ambient air temperature and the 'plane is full of fuel. The cost of fixing problems increases at each stage. I've used a C compiler that could correct a large class of input errors; it detected when it had done so and did not generate code, but gave more helpful error messages. > Programmers of the world, throw away your schemas! You have nothing to > lose but your existing toolset! (aka your chains...) But I _like_ chains. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
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