justification/reasoning of tags in XHTML forced to be lowercase?

I have always found it much easier to parse and read HTML when the tags are 
capitalized.

ie

<HTML
   <HEAD
     <TITLE>
        title
     </TITLE>
   </HEAD>
   <BODY>
      this is the body
   </BODY>
</HTML>

vs

<html>
   <head>
     <title>
        title
     </title>
   </head>
   <body>
      this is the body
   </body>
</html>



in the first snippet it seems to me that the tags and that the text stand 
out as different sets of things.  In the second snippet you have to work 
much harder to make the distinction between the tags and the content.


I understand that xml is case sensitive (rather annoying from a language 
perspective, but that is another battle to fight), but I am wondering why 
the XHTML standard is forcing people to use lowercase for their hypertext 
markup tags.  Why not force them to use uppercase?

What is the justification or reasoning for lowercase tags?



thanks


msew

Received on Monday, 14 August 2000 10:48:02 UTC