detecting those empty metadata elements

[Cantor, Scott]

Among other "non-ideal" suggestions, the SP will detect them somewhat more gracefully as well (and the message is somewhat targeted).

I solve it myself (in the sense of not having been affected by it, which is why we didn't know about the bug) by adhering to the rule that I script most of my metadata and curate/control the rest by hand. Nobody's sending me XML generally and I don't accept any that do, I just copy out the important details into a known-good file.

-- Scott