Re: SAX: Error Reporting (question 4 of 10)

Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Sun, 04 Jan 1998 10:10:56 -0800


At 12:50 PM 03/01/98 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
> public void warning (String message, String systemID, int line);
> public void fatalError (String message, String systemID, int line);

On this one, I agree with David and disagree with James. I don't
see the advantages to using an exception. I think that a SAX processor
should use fatal() (why the longer fatalError()?) - this has the
advantage that you can, after the first message, go on looking for
more fatal errors. Of course, a SAX processor must not, after the first
fatal() callback, emit any more element() or charData() callbacks.

I also think we should add a lineOffset argument, as someone
suggested; but I don't think that SAX should *require* processors
to do entity/line/offset tracking, since it's hard; SAX should
specify that a value of -1 for any of these arguments means the
processor doesn't know. -Tim