<rantmode> Hey - if you read my post a little more carefully you would see that I was bemoaning the effective passing of *SGML*. I was on a nostaligia trip. I am well aware that SGML is a bit of a complicated beheamoth, but it you have a decent SGML parser ( such as Omnimark or SP) you could do some really funky things.
XML is a very cut down version of SGML that requires much simpler tools to process, but every now and again that "simplicity" will come back to bite you and make your life more difficult. This was one case of that. Most of the time I am quite happy to put up with the verbosity. </rantmode> At 23:24 26/06/2002, Erik Price wrote: >On Tuesday, June 25, 2002, at 08:42 PM, Brian White wrote: > >>I was actually thinking about this the other >>day - every now and again I find my self >>yearning for SGML, where you could have >>just declared the wrapping element "end >>tag omissable", and then you would never >>have to worry about it - basically >>the end of the file would imply the >>existence of the end tag (sigh .... ) > >Yes, but that makes parsing very difficult -- if you're expecting to find >a closing tag, it should be there. You'd have to write a special set of >XML-handling functions or a special library to cover this unique breach of >the XML rules, since most XML modules (for Perl, PHP, Python, Java, >whatever) expect well-formed documents. > >XML is pretty verbose, yes, but the rewards of this are consistency -- as >long as the document is well-formed, it should be pretty easy to extract >the data from it without writing special code to handle these kinds of >exceptions. > > >Erik > > > > >---- > >Erik Price >Web Developer Temp >Media Lab, H.H. Brown >[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------- Brian White Step Two Designs Pty Ltd Knowledge Management Consultancy, SGML & XML Phone: +612-93197901 Web: http://www.steptwo.com.au/ Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content Management Requirements Toolkit 112 CMS requirements, ready to cut-and-paste -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
