TECH: XHTML

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 10:02:15PM -0800, Garth Wallace wrote:
>
>>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)
>
> Ahem.  "In emacs"?  Many, many text editors have that feature, including
> emacs' arch-rival vi. :) Not only that, but in the public domain program vim
> ("vi improved"), the rules used by the bounce-to-matching-parenthesis key ar
> completely customizable; <any-tag>...</> would be simple to add.
Should've known that mentioning a UNIX text-editor would bring the
text-editor partisans out of the woodwork... ;)

I was merely giving one example. Surely you aren't asserting that emacs
*doesn't* have parenthesis-matching just because vim does!

My point was that it would be very easy to lose track of which tags are
still open when using a bare-bones text editor that doesn't have an
end-tag-matching feature (such as Notepad or pico), and that it'd be
impossible for software to be able to tell when you're closing a tag you
didn't intend to (except in the case of adding an end-tag when there are
no start-tags, and even then it can't tell where the original screwup
happened).

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