Little Things Mean Alot
July 6, 2004
I was parsing a DTD yesterday using a commercial editing tool and ended up with a syntax error. Pretty typical problem, but I was really surprised by the difference in error messages I received between the original editor I was using and another one I tried after a frustrating hour. The second product did a much better job of isolating the problem (it proved to be two problems). It isolated the first error to the line number and the type of problem, and then isolated the second problem to the line number. The first one essentially gave up, saying little more than “this structure doesn’t belong here,” and even pointing to the wrong place in the file.
I haven’t looked at this in detail yet, but I have long held that XML parsing tools can be incredibly unhelpful in error reporting. As more and more people use XML, are they getting accustomed to this kind of painful troubleshooting, or are the products getting better?
Posted by Bill Trippe at July 6, 2004 12:51 PM
