Comment 12 for bug 174720

By the way, does the inkscape development team do any kind of automatic testing, or plan to do so?
The most recent issues might have been detected by some automatic test that, given a number of possible style descriptions, reads each style to inkscape data structures, writes it back to style, reads it again, and compares the both representations to ensure it can read what it wrote.

Another interesting way to avoid these issues might be some more extensive verification. An invalid style attribute like the one above certainly should never have been generated by inkscape itself. If you were to implement appropriate error checking code in sp_style_read_*, you could enable it while processing internally generated attributes. You might wish to disable it for file reading or attributes entered in the XML editor, or even better, you might wish to handle errors there differently. So perhaps you want a format error listener interface, and pass instance of that along. Quite a bit of work, but maybe worthwhile, as it would also help identify SVG documents in the wild that aren't fully understood by inkscape.