Idempotent XML processing

[Michael Ekstrand]

On Aug 19, 2005, at 12:11 PM, Will McCutchen wrote:
>> In my current project, I am working with XML data in a protocol that 
>> has
>> checksum/signature verification of a portion of the document.
>> ...
>> the server sends me XML with empty elements as full open/close tags,
>> but toxml() serializes them to the XML empty element (<Element/>), so
>> the checksum winds up not matching.
>
> Does it even make sense to use a checksum to verify XML, since there
> are basically[1] infinite ways to validly write equivalent XML data?
>
> [...]
>
> Again, I'm sorry because I didn't provide any real useful information,
> I just tried to poke holes in your current project.

I would agree that this mechanism doesn't make much sense. It certainly 
doesn't seem to fit well within the conventions most parsing 
ideologies; I don't know what parsing mechanism the protocol authors 
had in mind.

Unfortunately, I did not write the protocol... I must merely speak it.

- Michael