Peter da Silva wrote:
On 27-Sep-2007, at 08:32, Daniel Pittman wrote:
In other words: SGML would be vastly better without attributes at all,
ever. They are a waste of space, time and effort.
They're identical to nested tags, and they're more compact, HOW THE HELL
ARE THEY A WASTE OF SPACE?
Of course things like <b/bold text/ are also more compact than <b>bold
text</b>, therefore they got sucked out of XML.
Hateful buggers.
I was looking for some old hate to warm my bones, as I wait for a
fucking train that's not coming to take me to the French Perl Workshop.
This thread has been a great comfort.
I'm surprised XML retained <tag/> or <tag>foo</> instead of forcing
<tag></tag> and <tag>foo</tag>.
<tag /> did not exist in SGML.
Instead, XML *invented* <tag /> to work around the abortions in HTML
that are <hr> and <br>, given that XML declared the omission of closing
tags to be illegal. Since everyone was trying to coerce HTML into XML,
these caused big problems in validating the document in the absence of a
schema.
This syntax was then back-ported to SGML in 1998 or so, in order to
allow the XML crowd to say "see? XML is a subset of SGML". There were a
couple of other tweaks that went back this way too, that I have happily
managed to forget.
David
