A Modest Proposal -- <wink>

[Patrick Phalen]

As many of you know, on Wednesday November 3, Tim Berners-Lee sent the
XHTML 1.0 Proposed Recommendation back to the HTML Working Group for
further consideration regarding namespaces.

This unanticipated delay gives we Pythoneers a window of opportunity to
quickly submit a proposal to include a new XHTML element, namely The
Wink <wink>. In fact, with enough support, perhaps we could even get
<wink> codified as a fullblown XML element!

But to make this conformant, we will have to make one minor change.
Since <wink> has no matching closing element, it falls into the set of
EMPTY elements, of which the best known is <br>.

In XHTML, this has discrepancy been ameliorated by adding the closing
delimiter "/>" to "<br>", to yield "<br/>". This indicates to the
XML processor that the tag is EMPTY. Therefore, under the new proposal,
"<wink>" would, of necessity, become "<wink/>".

I'm sure everyone will agree that this small change will be more than
worthwhile, in order to make <wink> (not to mention
comp.lang.python itself) fully buzzword compliant.

Please consider writing email to the HTML Working Group in support of
this proposal.