User's discretion

[Tony Graham <tgraham@mulberrytech.com>]

Saxon 5.5, at least, is allowing user control over Saxon's handling of
recoverable errors.  Does this mean that for Saxon there's two or even
three sets of answers to the "39 questions" about discretionary
behaviour?

From changes.html in the Saxon distribution:

   The handling of recoverable errors has changed. XSLT defines
   certain conditions as errors, but allows the processor to recover
   from them. In some cases Saxon reports such errors as fatal, in
   other cases it recovers silently without reporting the error. At
   this release, however, the treatment of many of these errors is
   under user control. There are three options: recover silently as
   described in the XSLT recommendation, recover after writing a
   warning message to the System.err output, or fail. The option can
   be selected using the setRecoveryPolicy() method on the Controller
   class, or using the options -w0, -w1, and -w2 on the command
   line. Detailed handling of each error is described in
   conformance.html. The most notable changes are that under the
   default policy, (a) ambiguous template rule matches are now
   reported as warnings, and (b) failure to load a document using the
   document() function is now reported as a warning (it was previously
   a fatal error).

Note that the current questions about discretionary behaviour expect
"yes" or "no" answers, but Saxon's -w1 option mixes "yes" and "no"
since errors are signalled but Saxon also recovers and continues
processing.

Maybe the discretionary questions should ask if the processor signals
a fatal error, not just an error.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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