[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A little wish for short end tags (Was: RE: SDD bogus)
At 10:38 PM 05/08/98 +0200, Jarle Stabell wrote: >2. The method <MethodName>M1</> of the fantastic <ClassName>Class1</> can >be used in situation <Situation>X</>. > >I think variant 2 is faster to read than variant 1, and you don't have to >check the end-tags for misspellings. True, you don't have to check them; but the often forgotten corrolary is that you also *can't* check the end-tag for misspellings if you go that route. So if the data is erroneous you are far less likely to detect it *at all*, making for truly nasty debugging. This is an ancient information-theoretic tradeoff: you can always save space, but the more you save, the less chance you have of detecting errors. This is because when you reduce redundancy, you increase the % of all possible bit sequences that are syntactically correct. For example, imagine trying to communicate in a noisy room if every possible sequence of sounds was a legitimate English word. Or imagine programming in a language where every possible byte sequence is a syntactically correct program (APL and raw machine code are the only approximations I can think of to that -- guess why). > >The argument that compressing reduces/eliminates the size advantage of >documents with empty end tags often doesn't apply, the document will often >be stored uncompressed on users hard-disks, in databases and in memory. Sorry, but with Win98 rumored to demand 64MB of RAM just to run and with Moore's Law applying to memory prices, I can't muster much enthusiasm for an argument that it is too costly to shave bytes on markup. If you had to put *ten* full tags on every element you'd hardly ever notice any impact except on a 747 manual, and anything that big can't be handled practically in raw unparsed form anyway. I did a lot of statistics on this a few years ago: a fully-marked-up file with no minimization is still wayyyyy smaller than the equivalent word processor file in typical systems, so what's the big deal? I agree it would be handy when typing XML by hand or reading it raw. But it is not without adverse consequences too. I'd rather see better editing tools so I don't even have to know about such details. Steven J. DeRose, Ph.D. Visiting Chief Scientist, STG | Chief Scientist Adjunct Associate Professor | Inso Corp. EPS Steven_DeRose@b... | sjd@e... 401-863-3690 | 401-752-4438 xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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