xml-dev - Re: A philosophical question?

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Thu, 11 May 2000, Linda Grimaldi wrote:

> While I'm a relatively new member of the mailing list, it strikes me that
> this group may be dispositionally inclined to address questions such as the
> following:
> 
> In the XPath spec(and, I suspect, in the XML InfoSet spec, although I
> haven't read that one yet- it is on the list), the following statement is
> made in the Data Model (section 5.3, for example, also 5.4 re: namespace
> nodes) "... the element is the parent of each of these attribute nodes;
> however, an attribute node is not a child of its parent element."
> 
> I try not to be too obsessed by symmetry, but I find this statement somewhat
> perplexing.  Any insights?  And what are the implications, if any, for
> implementation?

It's simple... You have an element node, say the method to get the
children is getChildNodes(), this shouldn't return the attributes or the
namespace nodes.

However if you've got an attribute node, calling getParent() should return
the element node.

Does that clear it up a bit?

If not, here's some fun ascii art:

Element 1   --  Children ->  Element 2
                         ->  Some Text
                         ->  Element 3
            
            --  Attributes -> foo = bar
                           -> id = 42

            --  Namespaces -> prefix => uri
                           -> otherprefix => uri2

And all the stuff on the right has parent links back to the Element node.

Hope that helps!

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org http://xml.sergeant.org


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