Re: Caveat Tag Salad (Was: some ERB decisions)

On Sun, 20 Oct 1996 02:57:23 -0400, Arjun Ray <aray@nmds.com> wrote:

>At 11:01 AM 10/17/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>>
>>The SGML ERB met Wed. Oct 16th and voted on 
>[...]
>>    B.11 Should XML forbid, allow, or require empty end-tags (7.5)?
>>
>>Forbid.
>
>The DPH and "graceful recovery" arguments seem to have carried the day. 
>
>Yet, I'd like to point out (at the risk of bothersome repetition) that the
>*real life* experience of HTML suggests that we ignore the possibility of
>tag salad at our peril.

>Simply assuming that it's "obvious" people will get their nesting right,
>when explicit labelling of endtags makes the error particularly
>*non*-obvious, is *very* unwise, IMHO.

Arjun,

Is it accurate to conclude from your argument that:

1) It would be best to have *only* empty end-tags as that would guarantee proper
nesting in all cases (although not necessarily the nesting intended by the
author).

2) If we allow (or require) named end-tags, we must also allow end-tags to be
omitted when the named end-tag of a containing element occurs (at least as the
required form of error recovery).
--
Charles F. Goldfarb * Information Management Consulting * +1(408)867-5553
           13075 Paramount Drive * Saratoga CA 95070 * USA
  International Standards Editor * ISO 8879 SGML * ISO/IEC 10744 HyTime
 Prentice-Hall Series Editor * CFG Series on Open Information Management
--

Received on Sunday, 20 October 1996 14:30:22 UTC