Yes, I'm aware that we dropped "reason" a while back. But we dropped it because the original "reason" covered all sorts of errors -- in particular, transient errors on the server. The problem was that an ALTO library might want to display that "reason" to the end user. That was clearly inappropriate.
However, my proposal is different. This only happens because of a programming error in the client library. An ALTO library would never display the "reason" error message to the end-user. Instead, the ALTO lib would log the "reason" somewhere, for later examination by the developers. The ALTO lib would tell the user "Opps, internal error, send us the log file" , in the user's language. In short, most JSON parsers generate useful error messages for syntax errors. It seems like a shame to discard information and tell a developer "Something's wrong. Guess where." Back in the 1970's, the original unix text editor, "ed", had one error message: "?". I'd like to think we can do better than that. - Wendy Roome From: Richard Alimi <[email protected]> Date: Sat, October 12, 2013 13:43 To: "Y. Richard Yang" <[email protected]> Cc: Wendy Roome <[email protected]>, IETF ALTO <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [alto] Adding explanation for E_SYNTAX error We used to have a 'reason' field, but it was suggested in the the apps-area review that it be removed because of the concern over internationalization. Given that it's WGLC I would prefer not to revisit that. I don't have a problem with adding optional line and character fields, given that they can be conveyed as integers. I don't think it should be required, since not all parsers may provide that information. Rich On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Y. Richard Yang <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Wendy, > > Interesting suggestion. I assume that the fields will be optional, right? A > consideration is that the syntax errors typically are caught by a JSON parser. > I know that you know quite a few parsers. Will the existing parsers give such > information (e.g., line, character)? > > To others: if you have used multiple parsers, your experience can be quite > helpful here. > > Thanks! > > Richard >
_______________________________________________ alto mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto
