"A difference that makes no difference is no difference". The whitespace change is pretty much unavoidable, since XML does not consider the number of spaces around an attribute meaningful and none of the XML APIs preserve that information.
The <foo/> versus <foo></foo> is also not meaningful, and there's no way to tell the difference between them, though I agree that it would be nice to use the shorthand version when possible. Doing so would somewhat complicate the design of the serializer -- essentially, it would mean you couldn't finish writing out the tag until you knew whether or not this element was going to be empty -- but it's certainly doable if someone wants to put the effort into it. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
