Re: Empty element tags

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 8:52 AM, Murray Maloney <murray@muzmo.com> wrote:

> Aha!  You have made a good point.
>
> So the empty element syntax is not connected to an EMPTY element per a
> schema. I had overlooked that point.
>
> As an author, I often find that confusing.  I have been using oXygen
> lately, and it will sometimes present an empty <p/> element when I haven't
> yet typed in my text.  I have been thrown off by this.  It is not entirely
> intuitive for me.  I guess I need to forget my SGML DTD training and start
> to think of empty elements as though they are contractions, like isn't or
> aren't.
>

Yeah contractions are a great analogy. And yes, this is certainly different
from SGML, but really just in the general way that XML differs by not
mandating content model declarations.  It certainly does lead to
complications using authoring tools, but for controlled authoring cases I
think one can always reduce these complications by introducing schemata
that cover the ambiguities.  For MicroXML we're just looking to express
these at a separate level.

I hope that by developing a schema system such as Examplotron or a MicroRNG
that's to much less painful than XSD or even the syntactical gotchas of
DTDs, we can make the use of supporting schema even more widely spread in
MicroXML.


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