there's empty, and then there's REALLY empty

Henry S. Thompson (ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk)
Thu, 29 Oct 1998 14:49:20 GMT

I'd be interested in reports from validating parsers wrt the
following:

<!DOCTYPE foo [
<!ELEMENT foo (a+)>
<!ENTITY empty ''>
<!ENTITY space ' '>
<!ELEMENT a EMPTY>]>
<foo>
&empty;
<a/>
&space;
<a/>
<![CDATA[]]>
<a/>
<![CDATA[ ]]>
<a/>
</foo>

You might be interested in trying to predict the results BEFORE
running the parser.

nsgmls -wxml -c .../xml.soc

gives a surprising answer, which I'll post tomorrow.

ht