On 07/31/2015 07:06 PM, Dima Pasechnik wrote: > > You don't need a closing tag that can be inserted by software, > as certainly is the case for \section or \item.. > (unless you spent a large part of your life writing HTML or XML by hand, > of course :-)) >
The parser can insert them for you, but there are a lot of cases where it's not at all clear *where* the closing tag should go. Often, the presence of the opening tag is the bug -- not the absence of the closing tag. In that case adding the closing tags just makes things worse. Compare e.g. an XHTML 1.1 parser with an HTML5 parser. In XHTML, closing tags are required, but in HTML they're not. Writing an XHTML parser is simple -- any small XML parser will do -- but an HTML "parser" requires lots of ugly logic. I put "parser" in scare-quotes because you can't really parse HTML; you have to "tag soup" it. Most of the additional crud in an HTML parser is devoted to on-the-fly error handling (the user started a list item within a table within a paragraph and didn't close anything?). If you want to leave off your closing tags, in theory it's no problem -- once you know the error handling rules, you know where the closing tag will be added, and that's where it will go. But no one understands all of the error-handling rules, so no one really knows what's going to happen when they leave off a closing tag. It's very easy to trick people with short examples. So ultimately, it's just easier to spend some extra milliseconds putting the closing tag where you know you want it. Otherwise, the first time you have to debug a display issue twenty levels deep in some parser's error-handling routine, you're going to find yourself in the red. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
