Marcus Carr <> wrote:
| You haven't spent enough time around ugly (read "cost effective by
| coding alone") markup jobs then. I've used omissable start and end tags
| more times than I could count - the classic situation is for turning
| something like:
Shades of QWERTY and (old) LinuxDoc!
| <section>Laundry basket
| <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
|
| into something like:
|
| <section>
| <title>Laundry basket</title>
| <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
|
| It's intuitive, equivalent and less markup.
... until the time someone innocently leaves the title blank.
: <section>
: <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
This throws a validation error (<title> is not omissible if the element
has no content.)
Some people may try to "fix" this kind of problem - sometimes you really
can't think of a title - with pernicious mixed content:
<!ELEMENT section - - (#PCDATA,para+) >
Except, that would bomb too, whenever a user innocently added a </para>
somewhere and started a new <para> on the next line...
Eventually, to keep the SGML gremlins away, it becomes prudent to specify
<!ELEMENT title - o (#PCDATA) >
| I'm surprised that there's so little enthusiasm for this -
We all learn the hard way...
