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by munificent 4115 days ago
> "Then why do I need to say its name when closing? There's no ambiguity, it's always 'close the last opened tag', so why say its name again?". Folks at W3C must not know Lisp.

HTML (well, SGML, in this case) was designed for humans hand-authoring large documents. If your opening tag is a few hundreds lines above the closing tag, a little redundancy is handy.

Remember, HTML is a markup format, not a data format. Tags were designed to add a bit of data to what is otherwise a plaintext document intended for human consumption.

1 comments

We already have a solution for that:

  if whatever
    ...
  end # whatever


  (p
    ...(bunch of stuff inside p)...
  ) ; p
Now it's optional, not part of the standard, and the language is cleaner for it, while allowing for a way to help your described scenario.

Folks at W3C want to fix all kinds of non-existing problems (like HTML5 canvas when there's already OpenGL viewports).