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- To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Microsoft XML Diff and Patch 1.0 available
- From: Erik Wilde <net.dret@dret.net>
- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2002 15:39:10 +0200
- References: <8BD7226E07DDFF49AF5EF4030ACE0B7E07A971C5@red-msg-06.redmond.corp.microsof t.com> <p04330103b99bb9bb78a4@[192.168.254.4]>
- User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> According to the documentation this tool "does differentiate between an
> empty element <a/> and element with no content <a></a>" This is clearly
> wrong. <a/> vs. <a></a> is just syntax sugar. There is no significant
> difference between them, and tools should not pretend there is. An empty
> element is an element with no content and vice versa.
> This is a common misconception among developers and Microsoft should not
> be encouraging it.
this thread will become philosophical very quickly...
the opinion stated above comes from the infoset view of xml, which i
think is an important one. however, there clearly *is* a difference
between <a/> and <a></a> (just look at it!), but if the ms tool decides
to test for differences on the character level, it is not quite clear
why it is called xmldiff and not just diff... it should have a switch to
switch between syntax and infoset testing.
cheers,
dret.
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