[jdom-interest] Toward beta 9

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

At 11:59 AM -0700 4/9/03, Jason Hunter wrote:


>Why must we be more faithful than the DOM?

In my opinion, DOM is broken in this respect. Its actually 
considerably worse than JDOM at making sure all documents are legal, 
serializable XML. Namespace handling is particularly atrocious. If 
DOM were good enough, there wouldn't have been a need for JDOM.

>I firmly believe when the price of checking is high, it sometimes makes
>sense not to check.  This is why when you burn CDs it gives you the
>option "burn" or "burn and test".  It seems you, Rusty, would advocate
>you should always test because you need to catch bugs early.  But
>considering how long testing takes, some would prefer to trust the CD
>burner will do its job right.  Just like here some are willing to trust
>the parser will do its job right, or that their program will do its job
>right.

Trusting hardware and trusting a human are fundamentally different 
operations, though personally I'm astonished you wouldn't test a data 
CD. I find that particular class of hardware to be noticeably 
unreliable. But the real equivalent here is whether the CD burning 
software should test the ISO image to make sure it is indeed a legal 
ISO image. I generally think it should, and would be very annoyed if 
Toast tried to burn a CD and only halfway through burning it 
discovered that data was missing or corrupt.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo at metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
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