RE: SD1 - Short End Tags

John Bosak raises an interesting point vis-a-vis short end tags: A
"desperate perl hacker" would have a harder time writing a script that
made certain kinds of transformations if element names were omitted from
end tags.  I completely agree. For the kind of document John has in
mind, short end tags are not appropriate and should not be used. 

Where they do become important is when XML is machine-generated as a
transport protocol by an automated process. For example, it is very
important to me to consider using XML as a format for getting results
back from database queries. They might be financial records, electronic
commerce records, purchase orders, etc. These are neither written by
humans nor meant to be read by humans. In many of these cases, the
volume of data is large, but is mainly short fields, so the overhead of
lengthy tags is pretty high relative to the basic data. I'm getting a
lot of pushback from database people regarding this point. They are very
concerned that we make it possible for them to be more economical in
their encoding. Accomodating their needs means opening up a whole
additional category of XML user.

Received on Friday, 16 May 1997 21:40:54 UTC