Re: B.11 Empty end-tags?

[Charles Goldfarb:]

| I don't disagree with requiring all end-tags to contain the element
| type name.  However, you'll still have to maintain a stack [...]

For many things, yes.  But not for a very large category of everyday,
one-off reporting and document management tasks.

I still remember the day several years ago when a Director of
Internationalization came to me with a hopeless look in her eyes and
said, "We need to go through all of our documentation, right now, and
extract every string that appears in a user dialogue so that it can be
translated separately from the documentation.  Is that possible?"
(She was thinking of what it would have taken to do this job working
from the FrameMaker files that had been our standard source until
then.)  I allowed that it might be, and with the aid of my first perl
hack and the fact that in our newly converted SGML all text in user
dialogues occurred only in strings of the form <USERINPUT>
... </USERINPUT> or <COMPUTEROUTPUT> ... </COMPUTEROUTPUT> I was able
to deliver what she wanted, neatly alphabetized and sorted by type, in
30 minutes.  (If it hadn't been my first attempt, it would have taken
about five minutes.)  From that day on she was one of the strongest
SGML champions in the entire corporation.  In that one instant she saw
the advantages of markup ... and I saw the advantages of non-empty end
tags!

If you want to win ardent converts, this is one way to do it.

Jon

Received on Sunday, 13 October 1996 13:55:13 UTC