SPUG: XML::Parser empty vs. "empty" tags

[Jason Lamport]

At 7:58 PM -0700 9/15/01, Colin Meyer wrote:
>
>Simple answer: no.  <tag></tag> and <tag /> are semantically equivalent
>according to the xml standard.

Hmmm... do you (or anyone else following this thread) have a 
reference for where in the XML standard it says that <tag></tag> and 
<tag /> are semantically equivalent?  That seems like the sort of 
thing that would be left up to the particular application.  I don't 
recall the issue ever being mentioned in the O'Reilly book (which is 
where I generally go for my information on XML).

At 7:54 PM -0700 9/15/01, James Moore wrote:
>I won't claim to be an XML expert, but what you're saying doesn't 
>really fit with what I know.  My understanding is that the two cases 
>are supposed to be identical, and trying to distinguish between the 
>two isn't the right way to go.  Putting "xml represent null value" 
>into Google came up with lots of hits, the most promising of which 
>seemed to be (after only a few seconds of reading, so I could easily 
>be off base):
>
>http://www.adodb.com/xml_result.asp?xml_id=32
>

The technique advocated here is to use an attribute, such as <tag 
null="true"/> to represent null values.  I had thought of that, of 
course.  The reason I don't
like this approach is that it makes possible constructions which are 
semantically ambiguous and/or contradictory:

<tag null="true">some text</tag>

How should my application deal with this?  The attribute says that 
the tag is null, but there's some text inside.  Should it ignore the 
text and treat the tag as null (semantically equivalent to <tag 
null="true"/> )?  Should it accept the text and ignore the "null" 
attribute?  Should it consider such a construction illegal?  How 
should it enforce this rule?

I would prefer to use my approach because it makes these 
contradictory cases syntactically impossible.

-jason

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