Re: my worry about the recent libxml change

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2001 at 02:43:17PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> But you can't increase the strictness after you release. If you
> release a SAX parser that allows non-closed end-tags, and people
> start using it that way, you can't say later "but that isn't
> valid XML, and this is an XML parser!" and change the library, 
> however true the statement is.

Actually Microsoft did this -- their XML parser allowed </> to close
a tag in the first release, and they removed the feature.

There are numerous other examples.

Creating invalid data files on behalf of users is going to bite very
hard later.

As for leaving it broken...
I think as long as gnome makes no claim to be using XML anywhere,
but only something "similar to XML" or "XML-like" that might be OK.
It's not OK to call something XML that is not well-formed.
The documentation should be checked for this.

For 1.4.1 (or whatever) clearly there would have to be a program that
fixes people's files.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999

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