"Mark Birbeck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Hi Anne, > >> 5. "XML parsing failed: syntax error (Line: 8, Character: 0)" in Opera; > > That's interesting...does failing to parse properly necessarily have > to prevent rendering? > > In Sidewinder we validate the XHTML against the XML schemas in one > thread, and do some processing on the document before passing it to a > renderer in another thread. (Current renderers are IE and Gecko.) This > means that you'll always see something. We did it this way for two > reasons; firstly, because most of the content that claims to be XHTML > is actually invalid, so there wouldn't be a lot to see! And secondly, > because we felt that the ability to know whether something was valid > or invalid was most probably something that authors and developers > wanted, but most likely means little to an end user.
It's a common misconception that the XML 1.0 requirement that on a validation error that data be stopped being parsed to the application in the normal fashion means that UA's cannot render it. I don't know why this misconception exists, but it's generally used a stick to beat XML based languages. The sidewinder approach is an extremely sensible one, indeed the only sensible one that I can think of. Jim.
