From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2001-11-23T01:11:47+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26152] Re: Conformance Test of XML Parsers in Ruby(20011122)

Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> writes:

> > I totally disagree. There are plenty of cases where the
> > same app is responsible for both writing and reading all
> > the XML.
> 
> 
> That's the point; in all other cases, a non-conformant
> implementation is useless.

Perhaps - it also depends to some extend on the failure mode. If the
library silently ignores what you tell it to do, or silently writes
bad output, then that's clearly dangerous.

If instead it throws an exception when you use capabilities that have
not yet been implemented, then you can use it safe in the knowledge
that you're not going to produce bad output, or incorrectly interpret
input. Most of the world's XML applications use only simple subset of
XML to start with. I suspect these will be well served by even
non-conforming libraries.

Dave