One is less error-prone than the other.
An explicit reference avoids issues around white space, capitalization,
diacritics, misspelled words and accidental mismatches.
Whether one uses a commercial XML editor or Vi for authoring the tags,
there's a smaller margin for error. It becomes easier to identify
orphans and there's less maintenance if a user decides to change the
content of the start index tag, they won't have to go and change the
content in the end range tag.
I agree that both reduce to the same constructs and that there will be
subtle differences depending on whether a user has to manually type in
an attribute value for the index range in Vi or whether a tool is smart
enough to auto generate that attribute value.
- Yas