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Jonathan Borden wrote:
> Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> > Mike Champion wrote:
> > >[...] Does anyone care about round-tripping the
> > >specific syntax used in some instance, e.g. <empty></empty> vs <empty/>?
> > >There was some discussion on SML-DEV once about using it to encode the
> > >distinction between an element with the value [empty string] vs an element
> > >with the value "null" ... but the fact that the distinction wouldn't
> > >necessarily survive a round-trip with an InfoSet-compliant tool put that
> > >idea to rest.
> >
> > If XML 1.0 had genuinely described only a syntax, I think the distinction
> > between the two would be preserved. Since it defined a syntax with some
> > processing notions behind it, and the Infoset people have codified those
> > notions, I think those possibilities disappeared.
> >
> From a practical point of view that possibility disappeared when the SAX
> interfaces and XPath was written.
It disappeared long before that actually.
Quoting The Handbook [*], p. 307:
"An element has a start-tag, content, and an end-tag, but
there are situations in which any one of those might not be there.
[...] [T]echnically the content always exists, even if it is empty
and loooks as if it isn't there."
and p. 590:
"NOTE - If the element was empty, ESIS does not indicate why
it was empty; that is, whether it was declared to be empty [...]
or whether it just happened to contain no data characters."
If you consider a document to be a tree - which is the central
idea behind SGML - there is no difference between a leaf node
and a non-leaf node with no children. (If you think of
documents as trees, the latter notion is almost nonsensical -
a node with no children _is_ a leaf.)
> Is something like that really worth going
> back and changing a bunch of working code to handle this case?
Not to mention changing the core conceptual framework
on which all the code and specifications are based!
--Joe English
jenglish@f...
[*] That's _The SGML Handbook_, copyright 1990 Charles Goldfarb.
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