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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

If they're all <a> then you're back to square one.

JSON solves this with indentation, pretty printing, and using paired symbols that most conpetent editors can automatically balance. This solves the homogeneous case too.

Incidentally, XML can benefit from the first two, and many editors balance tags, so you can get the same thing there.

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It is rare in real-world XML that elements have children with the same type. Do you have a (non-divitis) example where the tags are all the same?

It happens with any tree structure. E.g. I used to work on a system that managed reinsurance contracts and represented them as trees of contracts.

Did the elements often have immediate child elements that had immediate child elements (and so on) of the same type? Like:

  <contract><contract><contract><contract> […]

No, there were a couple of layers in that case. But that doesn't actually help you add a child at the correct level, because the end of a contract would look something like:

                ...
                </contract>
              </subcontracts>
            </content>          
          </contract>
        </subcontracts>
      </content>
    </contract>

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