We have some kind of problem with a customer which is arguing that there is a semantical difference between two versions of empty tag in an XML file we're sending (pure XML no HTML..).
They expect:
<our-xml>
<some-tag></some-tag>
</our-xml>
We send:
<our-xml>
<some-tag />
</our-xml>
We are of the opinion that this is exactly the same but we could not really prove the arguments with facts. Only thing we found was in https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags where it says
empty-element tags may be used for any element which has no content.
Is there any discussion or more clear paper that we can rely on or are we wrong?
No
Start-tag/End-tag (<tag></tag>) and Empty-element tag (<tag/>) forms are semantically equivalent. No conforming XML parser will treat them differently.
Reference: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)
3.1 Start-Tags, End-Tags, and Empty-Element Tags
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Empty-element tags may be used for any element which has no content, whether or not it is declared using the keyword EMPTY.
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Historical note: There is also an antiquated SGML compatibility reference, which I include for completeness:
For interoperability, the empty-element tag should be used, and should only be used, for elements which are declared EMPTY.
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for interoperability
[Definition: Marks a sentence describing a non-binding recommendation included to increase the chances that XML documents can be processed by the existing installed base of SGML processors which predate the WebSGML Adaptations Annex to ISO 8879.]
Related Q/A:
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57494936/is-there-a-semantical-difference-between-tag-and-tag-tag-in-xml