(those who have found the discussion about short end tags tiresome
years/months ago, please forgive me and don't read any further.)
I would love to see empty end tags making it into the standard in the
future. In many cases, one only marks up single words, and then empty end
tags would justify having longer and more descriptive GI's, when forced to
write both start and end tags fully, one may be too tempted to use
"cryptic"/abbreviated GI's.
Example:
Let's say your're making a markup language for documentating source code,
which would be embedded inside comments in the source (like JavaDoc). Then
you would prefer the tags to be as "silent" as possible during
development/maintaince of the source code itself.
Compare:
1. The method <MethodName>M1</MethodName> of the fantastic
<ClassName>Class1</ClassName> can be used in situation
<Situation>X</Situation>.
to the "thinner":
2. The method <MethodName>M1</> of the fantastic <ClassName>Class1</> can
be used in situation <Situation>X</>.
I think variant 2 is faster to read than variant 1, and you don't have to
check the end-tags for misspellings.
The argument that compressing reduces/eliminates the size advantage of
documents with empty end tags often doesn't apply, the document will often
be stored uncompressed on users hard-disks, in databases and in memory.
Cheers,
Jarle Stabell