[Sax-devel] Reporting of well-formed content in malformed documents

[Elliotte H. <el...@me...>]

Consider a document such as the following:

<root>
  <child1/>
  <child2>
</root>

Clearly it is malformed because the </child2> end-tag is missing. 
However, a streaming parser using SAX will still report 
startDocument(),  startElement(root), characters(), 
startElement(child1), endElement(child1), characters(), and 
startElement(child2) before the malformedness is detected and a 
SAXParseException is thrown.

Or will it? In my tests with Xerces-J 2.5 I'm getting only 
startDocument() before a SAXParseException is thrown. The XML spec does 
not require a parser to throw away content found before the first 
well-formedness error. However, Xerces seems to be throwing it away for 
me, and I can't find anything in the SAX spec to say this is wrong. Not 
having guaranteed access to the well-formed initail section of the 
document really decreases the usefulness of a streaming API.

For my app, I would like to guarantee that all content before the first 
well-formedness error is reported via the normal mechanisms. is this 
possible? Is this a good idea? Should SAX be rewritten to require this 
behavior? Or am I out to sea? Thoughts?


--
Elliotte Rusty Harold