<p>Can an XML attribute be the empty string?</p>

<p>In other words, is</p>

<pre><code>&lt;element att="" /&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>valid XML?</p>

Yes, this is well-formed XML.
An easy way to test this (on Windows) is to save the sample in a
```
test.xml
```
file and open it with Internet Explorer. IE will display an error message if the document is not well-formed.