Re: short-tag considered unhealthy

At 04:03 PM 9/11/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

>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

Please, no; these save a tiny number of bytes, make it harder for
both humans and computers to understand, and for people who don't
already know SGML, have to be explained.  Also, on purely CS-theory
grounds, they push an XML parser over the edge from a pure automaton
to something that has to keep a stack.  OK, the cost of keeping a stack
is not high, but neither is the benefit of using </>.

The rest seem like good things for XML:

>  - attribute values without quotes around them
>  - the omission of attributes which have default values.

Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167

Received on Wednesday, 11 September 1996 19:23:35 UTC