Bug Fixes
Recently, I was informed that the XHTML5 facet of the (X)HTML5-specific interface was crashing due to a null dereference. When I fixed it, I somehow managed to disconnect the back end from the parser for the HTML5 facet. That one is now fixed, too.
On the generic side, the XSLT schema kept crashing the engine. The problem was infinite recursion in the JDK regular expression engine that caused the runtime stack to overflow. I have now changed the system so that regular expressions in the XSD datatype library for RELAX NG are backed by the Xerces 2 regular expression engine rather than the JDK regular expression engine.
The nice thing about a managed runtime is that stack overflows and null dereferences don’t bring the whole app down. In fact, they don’t even crash the thread; the front end can still show an error to the user. The problem is that previously the errors were logged to a file that I didn’t read until someone reported a problem and most of the time people don’t report the problems when they are told that the error was logged. Now the system sends me the stack trace by email if the back end crashes. (And I have fixed all known crashers in advertised features.)
I have also polished the Jing error messages a bit.