Why do empty tags in Ant build files have space before the closing bracket?

Question

Actually a pretty understandable question, it’s just interesting why empty tags in Ant files build.xmlalways seem to lower the space before closing />, although this is a requirement for valid XML 1.0? Perhaps this is an agreement that I would not know about, since I'm new to Ant, but I'm just curious.

Answer 1

Space before closing />is optional. The following equivalents:

<foo/>

<foo />

Some XML editors will actually share this space when formatting (in particular, oXygen).