XOM API for Processing XML with Java

["Michael Kay" <mike AT saxonica.com>]

> There's no switch for this. However it should be easy enough to write a
> subclass of Serializer that does this. All you need to do is override
> writeEmptyElementTag in the manner described in the JavaDocs:
> 
>      protected void writeEmptyElementTag(Element element)
>        throws IOException {
>          writeStartTag(element);
>          writeEndTag(element);
>      }
> 
> You shouldn't need to change anything else.

If you're trying to generate XHTML that follows the compatibility guidelines
for legacy HTML browsers, then empty elements that can never have content
(for example hr, br) should be written as <hr />, while those that could
have content (for example p) should be written as <p></p>. For details see
the XSLT 2.0/XQuery 1.0 serialization spec.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/