Re: [xsl] How to retain the end tag when outputting an empty element?

["Peter Flynn peter@xxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 17/06/2022 15:09, Kerry, Richard richard.kerry@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> Surely <test/> is canonical, and <test></test> isnbt?

My understanding is that we agreed they were identical in effect.

But several people felt that
<test/> meant "this element type is declared as EMPTY, so it can never 
have an end-tag"
whereas
<test></test> meant "this element is declared with potential content of 
some kind, but for whatever reason on this occasion it has none".

Certainly in the Humanities (ie TEI) this can be a very important 
distinction, especially as empty elements would often carry large 
amounts of metadata in attributes.

> And I guess the next question would be bwhyb as all XML parsers are (or 
> should be) happy with the single form, shouldnbt they.

Yes, absolutely. However, web browsers sometimes fail to grok the 
difference between (say) <hr/> and <hr></hr> and thus render them 
differently, so when you output HTML or XHTML, it may make a difference.

Peter