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Re: What is Tag Soup?

• To: Dave Winer <dave@u...>
• Subject: Re: What is Tag Soup?
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 13:53:51 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <EBEPLGMHCDOJJJPCFHEFMEDIIBAA.danny666@v...> <055801c2721c$ea008ab0$33a1dc40@murphy>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Dave Winer wrote:

> So let's agree that tag soup is bad. 

I'm not sure that it's up to a bunch of engineers and geeks to hold 
forth on questions of good and evil.  I'm pretty sure, though, that you 
can say definitively that tag soup is *expensive*.  Tag soup is the 
reasons why web browsers need megabytes of code quite a bit of which is 
reverse-bozo-filters trying to figure out what someone meant when they wrote

   <math expr=a<b&c<d>

or the like.

Certain people in the schema-enthusiast camp tend to condemn as "tag 
soup" anything that hasn't been validated by a schema that is the result 
of 5 years of committee deliberation, and I have little sympathy. 
Having said that, I have a lot of sympathy with XML's basic low-level 
anti-tag-soup rules that require you only to do the right thing with <, 
 >, ", ', =, &, and ;, and pay a pretty big dividend in making software 
cheaper and especially internationalization cheaper. -Tim

• References:
  • RE: What is Tag Soup?
    • From: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@v...>
  • Re: What is Tag Soup?
    • From: "Dave Winer" <dave@u...>

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