This is really not a programming question per se, but I was wondering why the name of the tag is required in a closing tag in XML. For instance, couldn't
<a>
<b>stuff</b>
</a>
Be written
<a>
<b>stuff</>
</>
So that each closing tag </> merely terminated the last opened tag?
So my questions are
- Would this work (i.e. are there any corner cases I'm not thinking of in which this would be ambiguous/fail)?
- If it would work, why didn't 'they' design it that way?