Re: B.10 Empty elements?

> If minimization is not allowed where content is possible, and any tag
> without content is defacto, empty, then why should I need the </e>?

Consider

<Chapter><title>this is a 200-page chapter, sorry</title>
<PGBRK>
<P> .....

We can't process the PGBRK and the other elements inside Chapter until
we've seen </Chapter>, and hence have deduced that there is no </PGBRK> --
otherwise we'd think all the <P> elements were within PGBRK.

Of course, it could simply have been a user error...

If empty elements were marked syntactically, e.g.
<@PGBRK>
then there would be no problem.

This can be done by allowind @ as a name start character, and then
saying that in XML, empty elements have names starting with @.
If SGML could be augmented to allow a different open tag delimiter for
EMPTY elements, it could use <@, and the entire problem would vanish.

Lee

Received on Monday, 14 October 1996 20:10:00 UTC