On Tue, 2 Nov 2004 09:10:58 +0200 (EET), Jukka K. Korpela  
<jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

> It's not that essential in XHTML, which uses only lower case in tag  
> names.

I still think it's a valid point.

> You might read "l" as "I", but hardly as "i".

Correct. You might read it as the number '1' as well.

> HTML was souped up quickly and eclectically, and it has no consistent
> policy on this; <blockquote> isn't particularly short.

True, but why is this maintained all the way through XHTML 2.0? Isn't  
XHTML 2.0 supposed to be a clean break?

> But many tags are really short, cryptic, and pure-code-like - think about
> <a>, which means 'link' (or 'linkable location/element').

<a> should be <anchor>, imho. No need to cut the last five letters, I  
think.

> The real reason is probably that many of the original designers and
> developers thought about typing in the tags using a simple text editor.

That would probably be the most common use pattern of XHTML 2.0 as well,  
but I still think tag names should be spelled out as far as possible.

>> why can't <l> be <line>?
>
> Because so many other tags are already cryptic. :-)

Heh.

> 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.

What's less bulky about <l> than <line>?

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        asbjornu@hotmail.com
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»