Absolute leniency

[mishako]

Pros

• User is never blocked by partially broken feeds they have no control over

Cons

• Developers are used to libraries throwing exceptions if something is wrong
• We're not spreading the culture of following the standards

Things we could be lenient about:

• Incorrect BOM
• Absent XML declaration
• Incorrect declared encoding
• Incorrect or missing XML namespaces
• Unescaped XML entities (& instead of proper &amp)
• Missing required tags or attributes
• Invalid dates
• Unexpected values

If the feed is so broken we can't fix it, we could throw an exception. Non-fatal errors can be exposed in the API, so that the user can decide if they want to treat them as fatal.

[PatrickGotthard]

I think that it's the best to make the behaviour configurable. Rome should be lenient by default but the user should have a chance to activate some sort of "strict mode"

[imk]

In the API proposal, there's a Features.SAVE_ERRORS mode and an errors() method on the parsed feed, I think that's comparable to a strict mode, just more flexible. That way, the user can decide if he want's to ignore the feed if there's any error or just for some kind of errors.

[mishako]

Closing the ticket: no controversy here as far as I can see. Let's try it out in the prototype and see what works best.