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

[james anderson]

although i agree with mr prescod's intent here, the details are not quite complete

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> Marcus Carr 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, trivial to parse,
> non-obfuscatory and context-free. They also have plenty of precedent in
----------------------^?
> many other languages. Short start tags behave differently depending on
> context, and thus are not trivial to understand, are not conducive to good
> document maintenance and are not implemented in any non-SGML language I
> know of.
> 
they both depend on state. and although i would suggest, off the top of my
head, that the amount of state required for short end tags is less than that
required for short start tags, that all depends on the storage semantics
implicit in ones xml parser/processor.

in my case, this relation holds and there would be two clear steps involved-
one notably larger than the other and a slippery slope by no means.
on the hand, given the absence of such a semantics for xml in general, any
consideration of the implications of minimization find themselves not on a
slipery slope but rather in an amorphous swamp...

bye for now,

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