Re: [xml-dev] Fixing what's broke

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 01:51 +1100, rjelliffe wrote:

>  Hrumph. An engineer should perhaps ask "what problem is this solving?" 
>  before passing judgment based on ugliness.

For </> the problem is usually this: in programming code, you can use
unit tests to gain confidence in correctness. But metadata cannot be
executed, so it's often harder to catch errors.

The extra redundancy does seem to help -- if you have an incorrect tag,
e.g. <author>John Grisham</title>, there's a 50% chance it's the start
tag and a 50% chance it's the end tag.  So with </> for the end tag, you
only catch half of these errors :-)

At SoftQuad we were able to put a dollar value on SGML minimization
features, as they were something like 80% of our SGML support costs of
the SGML products.

One can easily envision tag minimization with parsing rules more
robust than those of SGML, but on the whole I'd be up for adding
considerably more redundancy possibilities.

Consider a typical (X)HTML document with
<div class="content">
  <div class="content-header">
    <div class="google-banner-ad">
      . . .

</div></div></div></div></div></td></tr></table></div></div></div></div>

This isn't actually all that extreme, so
  </div class="content-header">
would be almost as good as using <content-header>...</content-header>.

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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