Empty elements (Xml)

[Tony Johansson]

Hello!

I can't see any point of having empy elements in Xml such as

<Car />
or
<Car></Car>

The two above have identical meaning which is that the Car element is an
empy element.

Can somebody explain the reson for having empty elements in Xml ?

/Tony

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

Tony Johansson <jo*****************@telia.comwrote:

I can't see any point of having empy elements in Xml such as

<Car />
or
<Car></Car>

The two above have identical meaning which is that the Car element is an
empy element.

Can somebody explain the reson for having empty elements in Xml ?

Do you mean you can't see any reason in using the second form instead
of the first, or you can't see any reason for having them at all?

If you're asking the second question, consider tags like <br /and
<hr /in HTML - just the presence of an element can have meaning,
without any extra data.

--
Jon Skeet - <sk***@pobox.com>
Web site: http://www.pobox.com/~skeet
Blog: http://www.msmvps.com/jon.skeet
C# in Depth: http://csharpindepth.com

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

Tony Johansson wrote:

I can't see any point of having empy elements in Xml such as

<Car />
or
<Car></Car>

The two above have identical meaning which is that the Car element is an
empy element.

Can somebody explain the reson for having empty elements in Xml ?

Tag not present and empty tag is different.

Analogy: in a database for a VARCHAR column then NULL and ''
are also different. You can somewhat consider tag not present
to be NULL and empty tag to be ''.

I don't know if it is a good analogy, but you can most certainly
test for tag not present versus empty tag in XML processing code.

Arne