RE: FW: Dissuading Woodpeckers!

Jim Whitehead (ejw@ICS.uci.edu)
Tue, 24 Mar 1998 17:13:26 -0800

On Monday, March 23, 1998 9:33 AM, Rohit Khare
[SMTP:rohit@bordeaux.ics.uci.edu] blathered this amazing piece of nonsense:
>
> > Of course, as with all problems in life big and small, XML will solve
> > this completely, by differentiating between <BIRD>woodpeckers</> and
> > <WEBBROWSER>woodpeckers</>.
>
> Bzzt! Invalid XML!
>
> In fact, XML does NOT allow compact end tags -- that would be <BIRD/> and
> <WEBBROWSER/> to you, Mister.

Double Bzzt! In an alternate reality where Rohit's brain was working on
Monday, he would have written:

"that would be </BIRD> and </WEBBROWSER> to you"

But, in this reality where he was more concerned about what he was going to
say during his Warholian 10 minutes of fame on Dev Day at XML'98, than to
properly rank on XML usage on FoRK, what Rohit actually wrote were empty
XML elements named <BIRD/> and <WEBBROWSER/>.

For the XML-uninitiated, or for those who just don't care but who are still
reading this email out of a perverse desire to read everything sent to
FoRK, an empty XML element, like:

<BIRD/>

Is equivalent to:

<BIRD></BIRD>

Now you know.

- Jim "it's a cold day in SoCal when I catch a RoRo XML booboo" Whitehead