Did I say that I consider having a sitemap schema descriptor harmful?
No, damn, I just said that I consider using that schema to validate the sitemap harmful.
Let's agree that there exist multiple levels of validation, and that each of them has its own merits. Coincidentally however, XML grammars are also used to drive editors, and since the result of this editing is fed into Java code, it better tries to attain the same level of validation, as close as possible, if at possible.
'Which' schema do you mean here...: sitemap-v06.rng, or _any_ XSD/RNG grammar at all? Sorry - just want to know.
Example, try
<generate uri="..."/>
where the uri attribute is not allowed in generate (shoulc be 'src'), the treeprocessor totally ignores this and sends the empty string to the parser, resulting in the error
System ID not found!
Sitemap validation has stopped us from fixing the error messaging capabilities on mistakes.
I don't parse this: in what way does the sitemap validation relieve somebody of the task of properly handling exceptions on the code level?
The level of error-cheching of the treeprocessor isn't really that pretty and know why? because validation removed most of the mistakes that *us* developers do... but when users don't validate, they come up with *wierd* error messages that don't give them *any* clue whatsoever on how to fix the problem.
Agree on the user aspect. But I don't follow the logic that the lack of error-checking in code is _caused_ by the validation process. That's just too fast to conclude.
My reasoning is that if we didn't have validation, we would see the same mistakes the users see and fix the treeprocessor instead of patching more and more the validation phase.
Looking at the history of sitemap-v06.rng, I can't see this has been happening a lot. Quite contrarily, some (myself included) have been advocating to relax it even further. But dropping it will effectively kill the small circle of people interested in maintaining such a thing.
Reasonable?
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
