Dave Winer wrote:
> So let's agree that tag soup is bad.
I'm not sure that it's up to a bunch of engineers and geeks to hold
forth on questions of good and evil. I'm pretty sure, though, that you
can say definitively that tag soup is *expensive*. Tag soup is the
reasons why web browsers need megabytes of code quite a bit of which is
reverse-bozo-filters trying to figure out what someone meant when they wrote
<math expr=a<b&c<d>
or the like.
Certain people in the schema-enthusiast camp tend to condemn as "tag
soup" anything that hasn't been validated by a schema that is the result
of 5 years of committee deliberation, and I have little sympathy.
Having said that, I have a lot of sympathy with XML's basic low-level
anti-tag-soup rules that require you only to do the right thing with <,
>, ", ', =, &, and ;, and pay a pretty big dividend in making software
cheaper and especially internationalization cheaper. -Tim
