</> as end tag

[Arjun Ray]

On Sun, 2 Nov 1997, Chris Lovett wrote:

> This is totally optional and experimental.  The only rational is that for
> large documents or documents with long tag names, this saves a lot of bytes.

Sorry, this rationale (among others) was discussed to death in Sept 96 on
the old XML-WG list and found inadequate. Please review the archives
(<URL:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-sgml-wg/index.html>) for
anything we might have missed. The good arguments for empty end-tags have
nothing to do with byte economy, but they involve other design issues that
impinge in a non-trivial way on SGML's minimization rules -- the upshot is
that empty end-tags as an *isolated* option (i.e. just an option per se) 
is a very bad idea for XML. I say this even though I was one of those
arguing for empty end-tags back then. 

Please reconsider.


Arjun






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