Re: OT: XHTML

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Garth Wallace wrote:

> Caleb Hines wrote:
> >
> > BTW, from a grammatical point of view, there is no reason why all closing
> > tags couldn't just be written like </> or something similar. That would
> > mean pop off whatever's on the top of the stack, or equivalently, close
> > whatever the last opening tag was. Then we wouldn't have to worry about
> > incorrectly nested tags. But it would probably be more difficult to read
> > too.
>
> I believe that SGML allows you to do just that, but it was never
> implemented by HTML browsers and wasn't included in XML. While it would
> make things simpler for a machine to parse, it'd be brutally hard to
> hand-code without some assistance (like parenthesis-matching in emacs)
I don't see why (after all, it wouldn't be compulsory (I mean, you could
close any tag you felt like, so you'd probably only use it for small
things (like the million closing </abbr>s you can get (and other primarily
top- and perhaps second-level tags (and I have a built in paren-matching
anyway (so long as it's only one paragraphs worth (you grow it when you
write like this))))))).

--
Tristan