Re: Cleaning House

Jim Jewett wrote:

> Accepting this sort of tag soup because of technicalities encourages

It's not what I consider tag soup.  To me tag soup is treating tags
in ways that don't even form elements, or otherwise do not have any 
syntax level grammar.

It's not a technicality.  It is explicitly in the formal grammar (DTD). 
  That had to be an explicit choice when the grammar was defined and I 
think it was done because the language was supposed to be directly 
manually authorable and including he redundant tags simply clutters the 
  code (most of the complications in the current language arise from 
attempts to bolt on presentation and hehaviour).

> sloppy markup in general.  Support for this sort of exception
> complicates parsers.

I am pretty certain that the people who take advantage of these features 
are actually those who have read  and understood the specification; most 
real tag soup has these tags explicit rather than implied.

If one ones a language for machine use only, one can make a use for XML 
syntax, which, in order to support the inclusion of unknown to the 
parser elements, requires all open and close tags to be explicit.

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 06:19:33 UTC