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Re: [www-vrml] X3D and the Draconian Parse Rule

I always felt that the easy-going nature of html is one of the things that contributed greatly to its popularity. Humans are fallible, net connections are fallible, and bit-rot makes even pure data fallible. Acknowledging that fallibility and designing our machines to take appropriate account of it seems like a good idea. Taking a very strict approach of "it's not perfect so refuse to have anything to do with it" seems a backward step. We have the technology, why don't we use it? It is not hard to put up an alert to note that the syntax is wrong or the file is damaged or "badly formed" (dontcha love that bit of jargon) and then go ahead and do the best at displaying it as possible. Surely this would make web3d more accessible and less frustrating for end-users. Computer language specialists tend to obsess about absolute purity for purity's sake rather than messy real-world concerns.

Please note it isn't my intention to put anybody down here. I consider myself one of those who obsesses about code purity too, but I try to balance it with my messy artist's eyes. We need those obsessions, but we also need to consider the poor sod trying to see the end result.

Best wishes,

	- Miriam


Alan Hudson wrote: 
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

Given that X3D has multiple encodings, that one is XML and that XML parse rules are not prescribed by X3D but by XML 1.n, what should a browser do if the file it is processing isn't well-formed?

It should stop. Same thing if it encountered a VRML Classic encoding file which was missing a final } or other parsing error. Browsers which try to carry on are not doing the community a service as content will play very differently across browsers.


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