[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)
Paul Prescod has quite rightly objected to a simplistic slippery-slope argument against short end tags. I have thought of what might be a stronger argument: as an (unstated?) design principle, XML provides exactly one alternative for nearly every markup item. For example, the following are some of the possible start tags in SGML (the second-last one is an example of a shortref): "<foo>" "<foo/" "<>" "|" "" The following are some of the possible end tags in SGML (the second-last one, again, is a shortref): "</foo>" "/" "</>" "|" "" In XML, start tags with no attributes look like "<foo>" and end tags with no attributes look like "</foo>". That saves a chapter or so from every XML text, a month or so from each parser-writer's calendar, a few days from each intro to XML course, etc. etc. Of course, any good pedant will point out that "<foo >" (with trailing whitespace)is a sort-of variant in XML, and that XML does provide what might be called variant or redundant features (such as the choice of "'" or '"' as literal delimiters, and pre-declared entities like "&" where "&" would serve as well). All the best, David -- David Megginson ak117@f... Microstar Software Ltd. dmeggins@m... http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/ 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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