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On 17/06/2022 15:09, Kerry, Richard richard.kerry@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Surely <test/> is canonical, and <test></test> isnbt? My understanding is that we agreed they were identical in effect. But several people felt that <test/> meant "this element type is declared as EMPTY, so it can never have an end-tag" whereas <test></test> meant "this element is declared with potential content of some kind, but for whatever reason on this occasion it has none". Certainly in the Humanities (ie TEI) this can be a very important distinction, especially as empty elements would often carry large amounts of metadata in attributes. And I guess the next question would be b whyb as all XML parsers are (or should be) happy with the single form, shouldnbt they. Yes, absolutely. However, web browsers sometimes fail to grok the difference between (say) <hr/> and <hr></hr> and thus render them differently, so when you output HTML or XHTML, it may make a difference. Peter
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