SAX: Empty elements

Geir Ove Gronmo (grove@infotek.no)
Wed, 11 Feb 1998 18:59:10 +0100

While working on implementations using SAX I've noticed that there is no
way to know if an element is an empty element or not (e.g <Para/>). This
could perhaps be done using some kind of lookahead, but should that be
necessary?

Perhaps a change to the startElement method in the DocumentHandler
interface could fix this.

This is how the method is defined in the Draft Specification (1998-01-12):

public void startElement (String name, AttributeMap attributes)
throws Exception

Perhaps this should be something like:

public void startElement (String name, AttributeMap attributes, boolean
isempty)
throws Exception

Best regards,
Geir O.