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xom-interest - Re: [XOM-interest] Canonicalizer Performance

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Subject: XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: John Cowan <cowan AT ccil.org>
  • To: Michael Kay <mike AT saxonica.com>
  • Cc: 'xom-interest' <xom-interest AT lists.ibiblio.org>, 'Elliotte Harold' <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: [XOM-interest] Canonicalizer Performance
  • Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:16:04 -0400

Michael Kay scripsit:

> I don't think there's any "should" about it. There's no moral obligation for
> software designers to handle pathological cases well (or at all); on the
> contrary, one has to optimize for the most common case. I don't think it's
> unreasonable to take the view that this example is pathological.

I agree, but I also would point out that the slope you are standing on is
dangerously slippery. TagSoup used to have a fixed limit on the length
of an attribute value; now the only limit is that of a Java String object,
because I found documents in the wild with tens of thousands of keywords,
often repetitive, in title attributes. It's one thing to handle such
cases inefficiently, quite another to fail to handle them at all.

We don't want to have parser authors claiming conformance to XML 1.0
and then failing because parameter entities are pathological (though
the Billion Laughs attack *is* pathological) ...

--
John Cowan cowan AT ccil.org ccil.org/~cowan
Dievas dave dantis; Dievas duos duonos --Lithuanian proverb
Deus dedit dentes; deus dabit panem --Latin version thereof
Deity donated dentition;
deity'll donate doughnuts --English version by Muke
Tever
God gave gums; God'll give granary --Version by Mat McVeagh




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