Re: [office] Rules for handling parsing errors (was: proposal for ODF 1.2: extensionof verticalrelationvaluesfor certain anchor types)

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

On Friday 04 July 2008, Florian Reuter wrote:

> Options:
> a) Treat it as if the attribute was not there
> b) Try to preserve the value
> c) Treat is as if the attribute was there but overwrite the invalid
value with a "default" value

d) Raise an error
e) Behavior is undefined
f) Behavior is application-defined

Today, an invalid attribute value makes the XML instance
invalid, and documents with invalid XML instances are not conformant.  The
ODF standard does not place any requirements on non-conforming documents.
 So, I think e) is what the state of things is today.  

A robust application would probably do a) or c) (which
I think are the same for reading, though may differ when the document is
re-written).

If there was sufficient interest in defining requirements
for a "robust ODF parser", then that is certainly something that
could be defined in the standard, and conformance requirements associated
with a "robust ODF parser".  But for it to be meaningful
I think you would want to take a comprehensive view of the problem, not
just unknown attributes.

-Rob