Simon Willison's Weblog: draconian

Quoting Mark Pilgrim

2008-08-05T22:52:05+00:00

My Universal Feed Parser was conceived as a weapon against what I considered the gravest error of XML: draconian error handling. Recently, someone asked me to implement a switch that makes it not fall back on lax parsing in the case of an XML wellformedness error. I said no, not because it would be difficult to implement, but because that defeats its entire reason for being.

— Mark Pilgrim

Tags: draconian, feeds, mark-pilgrim, python, universalfeedparser, wellformedness, xml

Quoting Henri Sivonen

2008-03-20T14:43:43+00:00

Draconian failure on error is not the answer problems of Postel's law. Draconian error handling creates an unstable equilibrium in Game Theory terms - it only lasts until one player breaks the rule. One non-Draconian XML5 implementation in key client product and the Draconian XML ranks would break. Well-specified error recovery is the right way to implement the liberal part of Postel's law.

— Henri Sivonen

Tags: draconian, henri-sivonen, html5, law, postelslaw, xml