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Re: short-tag considered unhealthy



On Fri, 13 Sep 1996 07:56:39 +0100 Martin Bryan said:
>Just to make it clear to everyone the consequences of what you are
>saying, you will be forcing me to enter <OL compact="compact"> rather
>than <OL compact>.  (Note that <OL "compact"> is invalid SGML!)

Yes.

Since the main application area of XML is expected to be program to
program communication, losing <OL compact> does not seem to me to be a
big problem.  Even if users do want or need to type XML documents in
ASCII editors, I think it's better this way.

The posts on HTML discussion groups in which users try to explain to
each other the meaning of constructs like <OL compact> have convinced
me, at least, that requiring all attribute value specifications to take
the form attribute-name, value-indicator, quoted-string would result in
much less confusion and would be a net gain for everyone concerned.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen


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