Re: [xml-dev] What's wrong with namespaces? Some observations and sugges

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Dmitre, hello.

On 2010 Dec 5, at 17:55, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:

>> Problem: given <:org.w3c.html.html>, is the proper match
>> </:org.w3c.html.html>, or </html>, or either?
> 
> Either, which means that everybody will use the latter for convenience.
> 
> Why is this so? Because in a well-formed XML document there is only
> one possible closing tag at any moment (we cannot have two or more
> same-level tags open at the same position).

If one accepts that reasoning (and I do), then you could abbreviate this still further, and accept </> as a generic closing tag.

Echoing the start-tag in the closing tag makes things easier for dumber parsers, and can occasionally provide a useful sanity check.  But only occasionally: most of the time it's just (to me) annoying visual clutter. [pet gripe]

(And regarding :foo.bar.baz -- +1 from me)

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk