XML Wishes (</>, quotes and entity resolution)

[dak at sq.com]

| [MA] For those that do, having the explicit end tags is probably a
| Very Good Thing, in that it saves confusion. And while it maybe only
| takes '5 minutes' (NOTHING takes five minutes) to add in a parser,
| suddenly a simple parser must build a document tree in order to know
| which element is being closed by '</>', which makes simple parsers
| into much more complicated ones. This is not a benefit.
|
| [JS] Ok, I didn't think of the possibility of anyone building XML
| parsers without building the document tree. (I won't disclose any
| estimate for building the document tree...:-) )

Hmm.  It seems to me that this only requires a stack, not the full tree,
but...it is highly error prone, and having Yet Another Variant Form
isn't a very good thing.  Languages need the notion of helpers for
"logical parenthesis" matching, and preferably some redundancy, in
order to help the user get this right, and to help the processing system
detect when it is wrong.  (Indentation is another possibility, but that
isn't available here.)

Best,
Dak
--
David A. 'Dak' Keldsen
Software Development Manager
SoftQuad Inc.

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