XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[John Cowan <cowan AT ccil.org>]

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
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