From OpenNMS

General discussion

Missing XML Name space

There's no name-space defined. This will cause problems for quite a few systems reading the XML data. Could a default xmlns be set so data can be tagged by XML aware systems?

Use of HTML tags in payload

I've noticed that the description element is returned with HTML syntax information escaped in it. There should be no formatting or assumption of platform in the XML data. Formatting and presentation is done outside the XML.

Empty elements

Why include elements that are empty? Example:

<assetRecord>
	<category>Unspecified</category>
	<displayCategory/>
	<lastModifiedBy> </lastModifiedBy>
	<lastModifiedDate>2010-01-04T14:10:35.464-05:00</lastModifiedDate>
	<node>2</node>
	<notifyCategory/>
	<pollerCategory/>
	<thresholdCategory/>
</assetRecord>

notifyCategory etc. shouldn't be included if they have no values? What's the advantage of adding empty elements like this?