A little wish for short end tags

[Paul Prescod]

Steven Champeon wrote:
> 
> The tasks and knowledge level Jon describes are exactly what I had when I
> first started doing SGML back in 1993. 

So what you're saying is that this sort of thing can work, even with all
of the minimization features of SGML, because you knew the general layout
of your data and/or you had a tool that could normalize the weird stuff
for you. You succeeded at your task because you approached it (perhaps
unknowingly) with either:

 a) the right data set: more or less already normalized SGML or
 b) the right tool -- a normalizer: AE.

That's exactly what I've been saying also. If you are going to do regular
expression hacking on XML it had better have been already marked-up in
some corporate standard (which would probably exclude short end-tags,
confusing entities, confusing whitespace, confusing newlines, etc.) or you
should have a tool that can normalize it for you.

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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