[maemo-developers] Enriching the Application Manager scripting experience

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 02:56:27PM +0200, Marius Vollmer wrote:
>> It is important to distinguish empty lists from empty texts.  An empty
>> list is written as
>>
>>     <empty/>
>>
>> while an empty text is written as
>>
>>     <empty></empty>
> 
> According to the XML spec, these two are exactly equivalent.  -1 for
> insisting for different spellings in different contexts.
>

XML parsers I had chance to use didn't distinguish beweeen those two 
too. Also when such empty tag is completely missing in the document 
like this

<x>
<y/>
</x>

<x>
<y></y>
</x>

<x>
</x>

it behaved the same.

I got null (in some Java parser) for all three such cases when parsing 
the value and found the hard way that there was no way to distinguish 
between empty string (sometimes valid value) and missing XML element 
(bug in code creating the XML or completely different meaning).

Frantisek