Hi, I'm evaluating possibility of using the serialization library (1.40.0) to save/load an application settings to/from XML that must be a part of another XML. I faced with some minor issues that were successfully solved but then arisen the major one: the serialization library does not support <tag/> syntax. Why I need this? After the whole XML is generated it is transformed by some XML processor to internal data structures and back to text. During the transformation empty tags <str></str> (for example, produced when serializing an empty std::string object) are replaced with the short form: <str/>. From the XML perspective, these forms are equivalent so XML processors allowed to do so. Since I cannot change the XML processor, I started investigating the serialization library. Specifically, how XML is processed. I found out that parsing XML is responsibility of xml_grammar class. It does not recognize <tag/> as a start tag so an exception is generated. It is easy to write a new class with needed functionality but xml_grammar is not designed to be used polymorphically... So, after all, I did not find an easy way to write my own archive. After that, I tried to modify the library. It was straightforward, and it works for me. Attached are original (*.bak) files and modified. Can anyone suggest a way to achieve such a functionality without modifying the library? Don't you think, this functionality is quite general to be included in the library? Sergey