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] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
