Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		You Prove My Point
Date:		2003-01-23 11:11:58
From:		Dare Obasanjo
Response to: Robustness Principle
Actually a number of our customers regularly praise the standards compliance of MSXML. Unfortunately, we also have customers who mistakenly assume that viewing XML in Internet Explorer causes it to be processed by the validating XML parser instead of the well-formed XML parser which is not the case. This design decision was before my time but was most likely motivated by good intentions similar to yours about reducing user pain and ensuring that even invalid but well-formed XML was viewable in the browser. No one thought to think about what would happen downstream when people assumed that viewable in IE == well-formed & validated XML instead of just viewable in IE == well-formed XML Your attempted slur actually helps bolster my point as to why your article should not be encouraging supposedly "user-friendly" but standards unconformant behavior.

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• xml dev posts?
  2003-01-24 03:35:19 bryan rasmussen [Reply]
  
  This reminds me of a post on xml-dev where some guy named Tim Bray talked about using MSXML to prove to people that their xml was not well-formed, it was an off-hand remark, but he said something along the lines of that people usually grasped that xml was not well-formed when he had them open it in IE and it told them there was a problem.

  
  Of course I don't know if this Tim Bray character might be someone to listen to. probably not, but still, just saying.