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Re: short-tag considered unhealthy

On Wed, 11 Sep 1996 16:31:52 -0400 Lou Burnard said:
>The BNC relies on it [omission of attribute name when declared value
 is a name group -MSM] because it has 100 million words to tag with POS,
>but does so fully knowing that this is *not* kosher TEI.
>
>>I think all forms of SHORTTAG complicate parsing, don't add enough, and
>>should be dropped in XML.
>
>I agree.

Well, I may be wrong, but the TEI editors can only very seldom resist
the temptation to contradict each other in public, and now is not one
of those times.

TEI conformance does *not* forbid any use of SGML a user chooses to
make; the TEI Interchange Format does restrict some SGML usages
(including turning SHORTTAG off), but no one is required to use the
TEI Interchange Format for interchange.  (And in TEI P1, we even
explicitly allowed omission of attribute names in the interchange
format -- it continues to astonish me, but there it is.)  So I don't
care *what* Lou says, the BNC is perfectly kosher in this respect.

However, Lou is right to say the TEI does *not* require, recommend,
or otherwise abet the use of SHORTTAG in this way, and that we needn't
keep SHORTTAG for the TEI's sake.

So I agree with Tim, too, at least as regards omission of attribute
names.  Watching HTML users struggle to come to grips with this
construct has persuaded me we really ought to get rid of it.

On the other hand -- there are one or two uses of SHORTTAG that I don't
think complicate parsing all that much, and might be retained:

  - empty end-tags
  - attribute values without quotes around them
  - the omission of attributes which have default values.  Without
SHORTTAG or OMITTAG turned on, 8879 requires that a value be specified
for every attribute which isn't defaulted to #IMPLIED -- I think it
would be better to allow omission of attribute value specifications
for all attributes not #REQUIRED.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
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