From Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 ( 2004-02-04) An error which a conforming XML processorMUST detect and report to the application. After encountering a fatal error, the processor MAY continue processing the data to search for further errors and MAY report such errors to the application. In order to support correction of errors, the processor MAY make unprocessed data from the document (with intermingled character data and markup) available to the application. Once a fatal error is detected, however, the processor MUST NOT continue normal processing (i.e., it MUST NOT continue to pass character data and information about the document's logical structure to the application in the normal way).
An error that causes the system or application program to crash—that is, to fail abruptly with no hope of recovery.
an error that can cause the channel to hang
an error that is so serious that the computer cannot continue the boot process
an error that will make the program run abnormally or will stop the program
A fatal error occurs in the SAX parser when a document is not well formed, or otherwise cannot be processed. See also: error, warning.
An occurrence that takes place for any number of reasons while operating a computer that often causes the system to crash, resulting in the loss of any unsaved work.
An error that causes a program to stop executing. See Error and Application Failure.
An operating system or application program error from which there is no hope of recovery without rebooting (and thus losing any unsaved work). ... more
In computing, a fatal error is an error which causes a program to abort - and thus may return the user to the operating system. When this happens, data that the program was processing may be lost.