[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 03:27 PM 6/23/2002 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
>If the instances are generated under your control by a machine, then by
>definition they won't use the short-tag feature if your regexps don't
>support it. The complexity argument also does not wash: entities and
>CDATA sections easily add the most complexity to XML of any feature. If
>you are going to use regexps on arbitrary XML that you do not control
>then you need to normalize away entities, CDATA sections and probably
>newlines in tags. Adding short-tags to that list of things is not going
>to change the complexity of your system one whit. The additional
>complexity in parsing boils down to an extra question-mark in the
>grammar.
I just don't have time to argue with people who cut and paste start and end
tags of some markup and can't figure out what the end tags were supposed to
me. Verbosity seems a small price to pay for explicitness.
If we reach the point of having psychic parsers that can determine the
intent of the writer, I'll be happy to support this. In the meantime, the
grumpy survivor of Dynamic HTML and the editor in me both scream that short
end tags would be a horrible mistake that will in fact add complexity in
ways that go infinitely beyond a question-mark in the grammar.
That's as polite a description as I can muster, I'm afraid.
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
|
