Re: why does <text/> have no firstChild with value ""

Paul,

This is misinformation.
In XML "<text></text>" and "<text/>" cannot mean something different. No
more than spaces inside markup, attributes order, ...
Open your file in any XML editor to save it, and these will be lost.
There is no way to differentiate them with SAX, nor in the DOM.


If you programmed a parser that considers "<text></text>" and "<text/>" as
different, then it's not an XML parser IMHO.


David

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Paul Williams
<pwilliams@infotrustgroup.com>wrote:

> I am merely stating a fact of my expertise in implementation.  There is a
> difference in programming between the concepts, and that fact should be able
> to be modeled in data files.  It's why SQL databases have some columns that
> allow NULL, for instance.  A NULL column in a database could mean something
> different than a zero length string, depending on the business rules at
> hand.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Boris Zbarsky [mailto:bzbarsky@MIT.EDU]
> Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 9:23 AM
> To: Paul Williams
> Cc: www-svg
> Subject: Re: why does <text/> have no firstChild with value ""
>
> On 10/4/10 11:13 AM, Paul Williams wrote:
> > There is a very real, and potentially important semantic difference
> between the following concepts:
> >
> > Empty:<text></text>
> > Null:<text/>
>
> Uh... there is?  Last I checked, the latter is just a syntactic
> shorthand for the former in XML, with no semantic difference (e.g. the
> DOM, Infoset, etc that are produced are identical).
>
> -Boris
>
>