Re(2): SHORTTAG

James D Mason (MASONJD@oax.a1.ornl.gov)
Tue, 18 Apr 95 13:05:33 EDT

Craig Hubley asks:
>Is there no facility in SGML to make legal certain SHORTTAG constructs
>and disallow others... I can see the abuses being made of a null end
>tag, for instance... but if you have to support it in an 'unrecognized'
>tag then you have to support it, period.

In short, no. The SHORTTAG feature (Clause 13.5.1) combines several kinds of
name and delimiter omission.

Craig's question was indeed asked during the development of ISO 8879; the
current conformance clause is the result of compromises (among other things)
to reduce the number of confomance options in the standard (and thus the
number of possible combinations of options: we had seen other standards, which
shall remain unnamed, with polydimensional matrices of conformance classes
that resulted in products that were in conformance with the standard
nonetheless being unable to interchange documents.)

Jim Mason

Dr. James D. Mason
(ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 Convenor)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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