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Last week there were a few posts regarding making XML less verbose. I'm quite sure these suggestions must have been aired before, but how about adding the following simplifications to XML 1.2? 1) Allow </> as an abbreviation for any closing tag. After all <xsl:template>...</xsl:template> is rather long-winded and the element name in the closing tag is completely redundant. I believe the closing tag syntax is probably a throw-back to SGML compatibility, but if XML 1.x discards that baggage then I think this would be a good thing to do. I for one get fed up with typing this redundant information especially when authoring XSLT stylesheets. The ETag production would change to [42] ETag ::= '</' Name? S? '>' If Name is specified (it's optional), it must match Name from the STag production. 2) Allow non-quoted simple parameter values. Sometimes I get caught out when copying-and-pasting HTML into my XML documents because the parameter values are unquoted. I'm not sure why XML added this constraint - perhaps to make parsing easier? Anyway, I would like to be able to specify NmToken values without having to use quotes like so: <test p1="not a nmtoken" p2=3.0 p3=1 p4=nmtoken/> The AttValue production would need to change to: [10] AttValue ::= '"' ([^<&"] | Reference)* '"' | "'" ([^<&'] | Reference)* "'" | NmToken 3) Remove the restriction preventing ]]> from being included in PCDATA. This was only included "for compatibility" anyway. These suggestions have the virtue of being backwards compatible because they would not break any existing well-formed documents. All the best ~Rob -- Rob Lugt ElCel Technology http://www.elcel.com/
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