What's the difference between and ?

Question

do you know if there\'s a difference between these tags on XML/XSD?

 and 

e.g:

<

Answer 1

You get this as your XSD BusinessArea should be defined as nillable="true". Something like:

.....
 

What this mean is that BusinessArea element can have null value i.e. empty.

And if element in XML doesn't contain any value then it must have attribute xsi:nil="true":

This should be invalid :

Two examples you showed should not be equivalent.

Check this out for understanding xsi:nil and nillable:

http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XMLSchemaTutorial/Output/ser_over_st0.html

http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/#Nils