Re: well-formedness error

[Danny Ayers <danny666@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Pilgrim wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 18:51:39 +0200, Danny Ayers <danny666@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  
>
> > Mark, of the feed-consumer applications which use your 'Universal'
> > parser, what proportion provide some signal that a feed isn't valid XML?
> >    
>
> I assume you mean "well-formed XML", 

Yes, my mistake.

> but anyway, I have no idea.  

Ok, try again : do *any* that you are aware of give a clear signal that 
a feed isn't well-formed?

> As a
> library developer, all I can do is provide a clear and unambiguous
> signal when the feed is not well-formed.
>  

By providing tools that make it easy to ignore standards, it's giving a 
signal that they don't really matter : "since some applications may wish 
to reject or warn users about non-well-formed feeds". The implication 
seems to be that most applications will want to forget it.

> http://feedparser.org/docs/bozo.html
>  
[snip]

> What end-user applications do with that information is entirely up to
> them.  I can't force *my* users (developers using my library to build
> other applications) to be draconian, or tolerant.  All I can do is
> give them accurate information.
>  

Quite. Which is why I think making it easy to ignore standards is 
generally a bad idea.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

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