Re: well-formedness error

[Tom Myers <tommyers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * 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. ...

If well-formedness is crucial then the charset is still sometimes crucial,
(unless we really stick to 7-bit ascii underneath) but the MIME type is
not crucial. That's good; I think I would like to be able to use
text/xml rather than just application/atom+xml for cases like
  http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/archives_rss.jsp
which can be subscribed to in bloglines _or_ viewed in my browser,
because it starts with a stylesheet reference:

> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/rss.xsl" media="screen" ?>
> <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#";

At the moment validator button blows up because it tries to validate the
output of the stylesheet, but underneath is legal XML in UTF-8.

My understanding is that this trick would not work for an application/atom+xml
such as http://rasterweb.net/raster/rasterweb.atom because Mozilla just
won't accept that it might be able to handle the situation itself. (If this
understanding is wrong, reassurance would be appreciated.)
  This is not a major usecase, but it is an existing functionality on a site
which is seen by tens of thousands of people per day and it works fine (except
in Opera, which insists on noticing that this is RSS; it ignores the XSL.) It
would be mildly nice if that kind of thing still worked in Atom.

Tom Myers