281983 - Error displaying XML file without proper closing tag

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: XML, enhancement)

Description

[Pander]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050110 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0+dfsg.1-2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050110 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0+dfsg.1-2)

When displaying an XML file which doesn't have a closing tag, one get's this error:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: file:///opt/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/log/fine.xml
Line Number 90, Column 1:
^

In this case it is a Java log file which has not been closed yet because it is
from a running application. The file starts with

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-15" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE log SYSTEM "logger.dtd">
<log>
<record>
...
</record>

but there is no closing tag </log>

Firefox should display it and possibly give a warning but not an error.

For example when the DTD or XSD is not available Firefox displays this warning
and the document contents:


        This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated
with it. The document tree is shown below.
-<log>
... etc.

Somthing similar should be available for XML that hasn't been closed properly
(yet, because of ongoing writing to the file).

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

the XML standard requires this behaviour when a parsing error occurs.  Its not
HTML where tag soup is a-ok.

Comment 2

[Pander]

(In reply to comment #1)
> the XML standard requires this behaviour when a parsing error occurs.  Its not
> HTML where tag soup is a-ok.

Could my request be configurable in FireFox settings? Like in many XML parsers
it is configurable to switch validation on and off.

This would enable developers to use FireFox for viewing not yet completed XML
files in runtime or during debugging. I would be happy to turn to other browsers
that do support this.

Making this configurable for the user to set XML validation on (default) or off
for displaying XML would be welcomed.

Comment 3

[Peter Van der Beken [:peterv]]

This has nothing to do with validation but with wellformedness and IMO we should
error on wellformed errors.