xml-dev - Empty element tags in expat

[Jan- Arve Sæther <jan.arve@birdstep.org>]

I'm just wondering if expat can preserve empty elements?

I'm telling expat to parse this little document fragment:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<size height="180" width="70"/>

It seems that expat will parse it with no complaints
and output it to my handlers as "size" is stored as a start/end-element
pair.

The consequence is that my output document will look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<size height="180" width="70"></size>

This probably also means that
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
will turn into the less readable (and more redundant)
<xsl:value-of select="."></xsl:value-of>

I can understand why this is happening because it seems that expat only
have one start/end-element-handler pair.

This also seems to be the case for SAX, so I am wondering if there is
any good reason why it is like this. Simplicity?
;--
JanA


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