Re: well-formedness error

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@xxxxxxx>]

* James Robertson wrote:
>Yeah, it's a choice :) We can be lenient and have users, or be strict and 
>not have any.  I suppose the latter course would be easier on me as a 
>developer, but then again - as a user of my own software, I also want to 
>read content that might not strictly conform to all the specs.

This is not about strict conformance to all the specifications, but
rather well-formedness. If a document is not well-formed, it cannot
be processed by general purpose XML tools. Do you think that Atom is
special in this regard or do you think that this is something that
applies to all XML formats? As far as I can tell, common XSLT, XHTML,
XForms, SVG, XML Query, Voice XML, SMIL, SOAP, P3P, MathML, ...
implementations are not really designed to recover from well-formed-
ness errors; they might not choke on all the errors, but generally
a missing quote mark for an attribute value or a missing end tag
would cause these implementations to reject the content, so it does
not seem that unrealistic to me to be "strict" in this regard and
have customers.