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Marcus Carr wrote:
> Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> > *Bonehead elements* might be good. Other than in
> > the SGML Handbook, I've never seen these used
> > in practice.
>
> You haven't spent enough time around ugly (read "cost effective by
> coding alone") markup jobs then. I've used omissable start and end tags
> more times than I could count [...]
I think omissible *end* tags are very useful; those and
NETs are the two features I miss most when writing XML.
It's omissible *start* tags that I find objectionable.
They can save a little bit of work when marking up
preexisting text, but cause headaches later on in the
lifecycle.
The main problem is that you have to make sure that contextually
required elements *stay* contextually required when the DTD is
modified. Everytime I've used start-tag omission in a DTD it's
come back to bite me.
> - the classic situation is for turning something like:
>
> <section>Laundry basket
> <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
>
> into something like:
>
> <section>
> <title>Laundry basket</title>
> <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
>
> It's intuitive, equivalent and less markup. I'm surprised that there's
> so little enthusiasm for this -
For me, the first form isn't _that_ much better than
<section>
<title>Laundry basket
<para>...
to be worth the trouble anymore. (I have used this kind of
thing in the past; IIRC what came back to bite me in this case
had something to do with short references, and the inscrutable
error messages you get if you leave the title out...)
--Joe English
jenglish@flightlab.com
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