On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:

> I think this is a good point.

It's not that essential in XHTML, which uses only lower case in tag names.
You might read "l" as "I", but hardly as "i".

> I've never quite understood why HTML always
> wanted to shorten stuff so incredibly;

HTML was souped up quickly and eclectically, and it has no consistent
policy on this; <blockquote> isn't particularly short. But many tags are
really short, cryptic, and pure-code-like - think about <a>, which means
'link' (or 'linkable location/element'). The real reason is probably that
many of the original designers and developers thought about typing in the
tags using a simple text editor.

> why can't <l> be <line>?

Because so many other tags are already cryptic. :-)

Well, I guess the real reason is that in order to make authors use the
new, more structured markup instead of <br> or <br />, the new markup must
not look much more bulky than the old style.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/