RE: Using normalize-space to test for characters in text nodes

> It's interesting because afaict the usual methods to check if a string
> is empty would all fail in this case.
They would also fail if the user decided that a="_" represented an empty
attribute. That's why, when people ask on this list how to test for an empty
node, we always ask them what they mean by "empty".

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