Of course that is the question - what does it matter? Does it matter whether or not the XML in the archive respects some standard? What is the xml_archive output going to be used for besides serialization - if anything. My preference would be that an XML archive be as "conforming" as possible. In this way, I don't have to mess with it when someone comes up with some use for it that I didn't forsee. So its not so much a technical question - any solution can be implemented. Its just that if I have to go through the work to address the problem, I would prefer to do it in such a way that it minimizes the need to re-visit it. That's all Jonathan Wakely wrote:
As long as you can read the same data back and restore the same sequence of bytes it doesn't really matter.