saving bandwitdh?

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: Marcus Carr <mrc at allette.com.au>
 >Kay Michael wrote:
>
>> Some of the argument against abbreviated end tags is psychological:
SGML
>> allowed too many such options, and it caused parsers to become
bloated and
>> incompatible. So the SGML oldies have an inbuilt distaste for them.
>
>Not this one - I still use SGML parsers specifically because they do
make it easier to mark up
>data by inserting the minimum number of tags.

I think there are two aspects:

    1) SGML is at heart a compiler compiler; to complain that it
accomodates
variant syntaxes is like complaining that lex allows different delimiter
tokens:
that is the point of it.

    2) SGML'86 allows different implementation to implement only parts
of the optional feature set, but did not provide a way to name or manage
these (i.e., invoking the SGML declaration using a formal public
identifier).
This in turn made it too difficult to create any brand identity: the
document
could not self-describe its brand of syntax.   XML is largely a specific
Web-SGML declaration with a good brand-identity mechanism.


Rick Jelliffe

(N.b. despite the  Allette email address, I don't work there. I just
keeping an
email account there.)


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