Re: A little wish for short end tags

Gregg Reynolds (greyno@mcs.com)
Fri, 15 May 1998 23:03:36 -0400

Jon Bosak wrote:
>
> [Toby Speight:]
>
> | But there are plenty of (non-parsing) applications that benefit from
> | XML standard end-tags.
>
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.
>

Given:
1. Short tags
2. Some non-trivial number of docs marked up with short-tags
3. Some non-trivial number of DPH's desperate to hack at these docs;

Isn't it likely that some non-trivial number of XML normalizers will
become at least as widespread as perl? Thereby relieving our lonely
hackers of some non-trivial measure of their desperation?