A little wish for short end tags (Was: RE: SDD bogus)

[Marcus Carr]

Paul Prescod wrote:

> > I'd be interested to hear how you would justify allowing short end tags and not
> > short start tags;
>
> Simple: short end tags are trivial to understand...

> Short start tags behave differently depending on context, and thus are not trivial to
> understand,

If you mean that they behave differently based on whether OMITTAG is set to 'yes' or
'no', that wouldn't be an issue for XML.

> are not conducive to good document maintenance

I couldn't agree more, but short end tags can be abused in the same way.

> and are not implemented in any non-SGML language I know of.

Me either, though I'm not sure if that matters.
I don't want short start tags, I don't like short start tags and I have never
(intentionally) used short start tags, but unless I have misunderstood you, the reasons
you have given above don't seem sufficient basis for voting them down while supporting
short end tags. If (as I'm sure most of us believe) these issues are decided primarily
on the basis of intelligent discourse rather than gut feeling, it would appear that
there is not yet enough to separate short start tags from short end tags. If gut
feeling does come into it, then so be it - I can accept that, I just wasn't aware that
was the way the process works.

This is getting a mile off topic...


--
Regards

Marcus Carr                  email:  mrc at allette.com.au
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