Re: [xml-dev] Why is terseness of minimal importance?

["C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>]

Michael Kay writes:

> ...

> I suspect those who argued that terseness was not important for XML
> were actually arguing that human readability is more important than
> message size.

For what it's worth, that matches my recollection.

> ...

> I also suspect that the reason the matter came up for debate was the
> more specific question of whether element names should be repeated in
> the end tag. To be honest, I'm still unsure in my own mind about that
> decision -- there are arguments both ways. ...

My memory, for what it is worth, is that the main reason the matter was
explicitly addressed was the relatively large portion of ISO 8879
devoted to mechanisms for minimizing the number of keystrokes needed to
encode a document.  The SGML users in the working group were convinced
by a large majority that mechanisms like SHORTTAG, OMITTAG, and DATATAG
had unfavorable cost : benefit ratios:  the level of complexity they
introduced was not paid back by their usefulness.  They were also a bit
error-prone:  even experienced SGML users reported discovering that
their use of tag omission had led in some cases to document structures
which were not quite what they had intended.

So I read that item in the list of design principles as a signal:  don't
expect tag omission or any of the other paraphernalia of SGML that made
it so hard for people to produce conforming SGML parsers.

I have not checked the records of the WG, but I suspect that the
decision on repeating the identifier in the end-tag came later and was
handled by an appeal to the principle.  Omission of the name works fine
in short examples, but once the end-tag is more than a screen or two
away from the start-tag, it's unhelpful.  Making the name optional might
have worked, but every optional feature adds complexity, and we had some
very persuasive people arguing for cutting away every possible source of
complexity.

-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com