Making XML Smaller

In all the hand-wringing discussions about XML's verbosity that I've read over the years, I have yet to hear anyone suggest simply truncating all closing tags to </>. In other words, if you've got

<data>
  <item>something</item>
</data>

why not just shorten it to


<data>
  <item>something</>
</>


Verbose closing tags are a pure waste of space (albeit required by XML spec). Abbreviated closing tags don't make the file any less parsable. When the parser encounters </> it knows that the closure is at the nesting level of the previous opening tag. If not, the XML was not well-formed to begin with.

Verbose closing tags are just that. Unneeded verbosity.