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Can an element be sometimes empty?

• From: Michel Rodriguez <mrodrigu@i...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 13:12:39 -0400 (EDT)

Hi,

I came accross an interesting albeit theoretical problem today: can an
element in a well-formed XML document be sometimes empty and sometimes
not?

<doc>
  <weird_element/>
  <weird_element>with a content </weird_element>
</doc>

I saw nothing in the spec about this situation, but on the other hand this
poor well-formed document has no way of ever becoming valid, as the spec
states (rule 46) that an element's contentspec is either EMPTY or MIXED or
children. So you can't write a DTD for it.

Expat does not seem to have a problem with it though.

Is this a hole in the spec or did I miss something?

Michel Rodriguez
m.v.rodriguez@i...
http://www.xmltwig.cx

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Can an element be sometimes empty?
    • From: Gilles Marichal <gmaricha@A...>
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    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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