3 ms·
Because writing a good parser that is fast, secure and works on a whole bunch of crappy/broken/non compliant formats is very hard. Sure its easy to write a fas
by KaiserPro 5y ago
Because writing a good parser that is fast, secure and works on a whole bunch of crappy/broken/non compliant formats is very hard.
Sure its easy to write a fast, standards compliant parser (assuming its not a format like .psd or a word document), but it will choke on the multitude of dodgy versions of files out there, causing complaints
_most_ users only care about the picture/sound/video/other viewing correctly, with security a distant second. (they expect it to be secure) so pressure is on to make the parse work with everything.
- tlavoie 5y agoI get where product people will noisily demand this, but perhaps the idea of parsing even broken files successfully is a large part of the problem. HTML started this way, and it's still terrible. At an ancient job, we did a lot of scraping content from HTML as the de facto input source. Each content provider had to have custom code written, and it was as bad as you would expect. XML came about, and its largest advantage was that invalid input was broken, and must be rejected as such.