Data Model 4.1.8 - children accessor

In what circumstances can a document node exist which has no child nodes? The 
children accessor is said to return an empty sequence for document nodes 
which have no children.

The document-node() constructor (4.2.2) has to have a non-empty sequence of 
child nodes as arguments.

An "XML document" with no document element is a pretty poor "XML document".

In addition a document node is said to have a [children] property. In the XML 
Infoset Recommendation the [children] property of the document information 
item is said always to have exactly one child element information item.

Can a document node with no child nodes exist without causing an error?

Andrew Watt

Received on Friday, 28 February 2003 17:27:29 UTC