Re: BXE Wishlist

On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 09:33:46PM +0100, Christian Stocker wrote:
> Sure, but BXE shouldn't send empty files or documents just consisting of 
> the root node.  You can't produce empty XML files with BXE at all 
> (currently), but the later would be possible ;)
> 
> To sum up, BXE shouldn't send stuff over the wire, if an error happened. 
> I don't know right now, why this happens at all. But Jean Pierre will 
> certainly shed some light on that. And yes, you definitively should also 
> do some checks on the server side.

The point that I was trying to make was that, in spite of the fact
that BXE should, as you say, make a best effort to supply only valid
data to the backend, BXE mustn't be held responsible for overwriting
valid data with invalid data. The responsibility for ensuring that
valid data is over-written only with more valid data can only properly
rest with the over-writing application, not the supplier of the data,
be it BXE or otherwise.

Selfishly, I just want to make sure that you're spending your time
improving BXE and adding great new features, not pursuing the
impossible ;o)

When BXE (or anything else) "misbehaves", we would do well to assume
that it will do the worst thing that is possible for it to do (like
the famous buttered toast always landing butter side down :o), and
defend ourselves against that possibility; perhaps for BXE this "worst
thing" is sending back an empty document?

I'm not altogether sure that it's possible to write a program that has
such perfect self-knowledge and well-defined behaviour under error as
"never sending back empty files or document just consisting of the
root node" would require. Even if it is, there will always be a slim
chance that the back-end will get invalid stuff through a Byzantine
error on the part of BXE, the browser, the web-server, either host OS,
or (in extremis) some network device between client and server.

Anyway, enough of me waffling: I think we agree that the only sensible
thing to do is to check on the server-side.

Cheers,

Emmet.

-- 
,----------------------=[ [email protected] ]=------------------------.
| Internet Software & Business Automation.           C, Perl, XML, SQL |
| Legal: http://netrogen.com/about/email.php       Unix/Linux, Windows |
`---------------------=[ http://netrogen.com/ ]=-----------------------'
-- 
bx-editor-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.bitflux.ch/cgi-bin/listinfo/bx-editor-users