| But there are plenty of (non-parsing) applications that benefit from
| XML standard end-tags. An obvious one is selection of an element from
| a document; a regexp search for the start-tag, and then just match
| start and end tags *for that element type*, keeping track of depth
| *for that element type* (we don't even need to do that if the element
| type is known not to be nestable in itself). That application need
| not even notice tags for other element types.
This is precisely the scenario that I had in mind when I invented the
figure of the Desperate Perl Hacker -- someone who has no idea how to
build a parser but can do very powerful operations on large quantities
of XML using simple pattern matches if the presence of full end-tags
is guaranteed.
Jon