Re: well-formedness error

[Martin Duerst <duerst@xxxxxx>]

At 12:58 04/06/19 -0400, Mark Pilgrim wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 18:10:42 +0200, Julian Reschke
> <julian.reschke@xxxxxx> wrote:
> > >>A perfect XML parser is one that accepts wellformed documents and
> > >>rejects all others. So from that point of view, for instance MSXML is
> > >>perfect (or close to that).
> > > http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1689.html#c1074118904
> > I talked about MSXML. You are referring to a comment on .NET's XML
> > parser. These are different things.
>
> Sorry, I meant http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1689.html#c1074112699

Is this a real example, or a constructed one? And if an 'unknown glyph'
box is displayed, that may well be enough for motivating the author
to fix it. Apart from that, passing through some of the control codes
in some circumstances can lead to serious problems (e.g. on a tty).

What I think a lot of people here don't get:

- Well-formedness, validity, and otherwise adherence to standards
  is not a goal in itself.
- Accepting lousy feeds is not a problem in the short term. But
  it's very similar to the prisoner's dilemma: If we all give the
  right answers, everybody will be fine. But if somebody starts
  to give the wrong answers, everybody will end up in bugwards
  compatibility hell.

Regards,    Martin.