Re: SAX - endDocument() confusion again

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <[email protected]>
To: "Karl Waclawek" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 7:30 PM


> At 6:40 PM -0500 2/27/04, Karl Waclawek wrote:
> 
> >I admit I am not a native speaker, but IMO the wording above
> >would not contradict the behaviour of an exception stopping
> >the parser cold. Exceptions are normally thought of as
> >the "exceptional" case, and documenting the behaviour of an
> >implementation does usually not imply that it will behave
> >the same when an exception is thrown.
> >
> 
> A very good point. However, I think the sort of exception you're 
> describing is only a truly exceptional exception such as an I/O error 
> like a broken socket or an out of memory condition. I'm not sure a 
> malformed document qualifies as exceptional in this context.

I agree. I rather thought of exceptions thrown in the call-backs,
based on how the application deals with the information it receives.

> There's 
> no reason, after all, the parse method has to throw an exception to 
> indicate malformedness. It could easily have returned a boolean 
> indicating whether or not the document was well-formed. Not that I'm 
> suggesting such a change at this late date, of course. I just want to 
> point out that there are other ways to design such an API that don't 
> rely on exceptions. 

That would be more along my line of thinking anyway ...

> In practice I encounter malformed documents far 
> more often than I/O errors, out of memory errors, and similar 
> problems. They just don't feel that exceptional to me.

Absolutely.

Karl


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