xml-dev - Can an element be sometimes empty?

[Michel Rodriguez <mrodrigu@ieee.org>]

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@ieee.org
http://www.xmltwig.cx