A little wish for short end tags

[Jani Jaakkola]

On 14 May 1998, Toby Speight wrote:

> Paul> Paul Prescod <URL:mailto:papresco at technologist.com>
> 
> Paul> I do not believe that there is any way ot implementat a legal XML
> Paul> parser without keeping around all of the information required to
> Paul> implement short end tags.  Checking that an end-tag matches its
> Paul> start-tag (the current situation) is no easier than not checking.
> 
> But there are plenty of (non-parsing) applications that benefit from
> XML standard end-tags.  An obvious one is selection of an element from
> a document; a regexp search for the start-tag, and then just match
> start and end tags *for that element type*, keeping track of depth
> *for that element type* (we don't even need to do that if the element
> type is known not to be nestable in itself).  That application need
> not even notice tags for other element types.

Yes. I've got now an indexing and SGML/XML aware version of
sgrep under development (it works, but isn't ready
for release yet). It does not do real XML-parsing; it only scans
files for indexes of start and end tags other markup. Therefore it is
also very fast. It wouldn't work (at least as well) with short
end tags.

However, writing a normalizer for short end tags in XML would
be trivial, unlike writing a normalizer for all possible short tags in
SGML (thank you James). So if someone wants to use short end
tags while authoring or internally in some organization i'd say
that go for it. But please, keep the standard small and simple.

- Jani


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