There's an increasing need for standardisation of syntax for "end tags". TWikiVariables are frequently used as delimiters for blocks of content - e.g. STARTINCLUDE....STOPINCLUDE, SECTION...ENDSECTION but there is no standardisation for the syntax of end tags, making it impossible to write a general parser for these kinds of constructs.

Some alternatives:

1. Bastardised XML tags c.f. <verbatim>...</verbatim>.
   • + consistent with <verbatim>
   • - not consistent with anything else
   • - confusion with HTML tags
   • - Personally I think this is really, really, really bad practice, and would like to deprecate <verbatim> in favour of %VERBATIM%
2. %TAG%...%ENDTAG - Reserve the three characters END at the start of a tag name to refer to a tag that is paired with a matching tag without the END
   • + Consistent with SECTION...ENDSECTION
   • + Simple, intention-revealing
   • - Slight risk of conflict with real words e.g. ENDLESS, ENDEAVOUR, ENDIVE, ENDOMORPHIC
3. %TAG%...%/TAG%
   • + consistent with XML syntax
   • - not very intention-revealing
   • - not in current use

My personal preference is to standardise on 2.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 31 Oct 2005

Do you like underscores? END_VERBATIM would avoid conflict with END.* words.

-- MartinCleaver - 31 Oct 2005

Having the END at the ... end would avoid that problem:

• %VERBATIMEND%
• %TAGEND%
• %COLOREND%

just match on "%[A-Z][A-Z]*END%"

Somehow the END at the end seems approrate. I don't know if the pun maps to other languages.

-- AntonAylward - 31 Oct 2005

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CategoryTWikiSyntax