SAX Exception Handling

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 17:45 04/05/98 +0700, James Clark wrote:

>The original goal of SAX was to be simple and easy to use for
>application writers.  

I hope that it still is - I appreciate that we have had some drift, but
much of it has centered on Exceptions.

>I don't think requiring this sort of mumbo jumbo
>even for trivial programs is consistent with this goal.
>
>I don't see an ideal solution, 

This seems to be a problem that is fundamental to Exception handling in
general (not SAX-specific). It's compounded by the fact that we need to (a)
interoperate with Java Exceptions (b) assume that SAX will be put alongside
packages that have yet another set of Exceptions.

I spent yesterday afternoon hacking the new SAX/AElfred including the
extraction of error messages and transferring them to display of nonwf
documents. My blunderings weren't pretty (I failed to realise that one test
example threw FileNotFoundException rather than a parsing error, and
couldn't understand why I couldn't extract the SAXException message). But I
think I can work with the current SAX. (I was one of those who suggested
SAX should 'wrap' Exceptions, so pillory me.)

>but I can think of several possibilities
>in addition to the old solution and the current solution, any of which I
>think would be an improvement over the current solution:

[... workable solutions snipped ...]

I am sure that David will look at these carefully - I think the final
decision is essentially his - he has put in *so* much work and got enough
public and private mail to make a balanced decision.  David must feel like
he's on a never-ending marathon - if he feels that SAX1.0gamma is 'it', I
think we should accept it. [Every finalisation has bits that someone
doesn't like, even XML...]

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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