[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)
Simon St.Laurent wrote: > At 11:33 AM 3/29/01 -0500, Mike.Champion@S... wrote: > > >I just remembered one other thing that the InfoSet doesn't model that has > >generated some discussion about round-trippability --- the two legal XML > >syntaxes for empty elements. 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. Is something like that really worth going back and changing a bunch of working code to handle this case? Remember that there exists a SAX filter which constructs a SAX2 ContentHandler from a DocumentHandler and so even something as radical as namespaces could be layered. Distinguishing between <foo></foo> and <foo /> can't be done with a SAX processor -- to my knowledge. To me the value of an 'infoset' is a rough intersection between SAX, XPath and the DOM. -Jonathan
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