xml-dev - Re: A philosophical question?

["Linda Grimaldi" <grimlinda@earthlink.net>]

As soon as I thought about it a little more (after sending the question, of
course), this part of it became fairly clear- thanks for the help.  However,
I still sort of wonder about attributes- the decision as to whether to treat
something as an attribute or as a child element seems almost arbitrary, and
I would think there may be times when someone wants to get 'all nodes where
location="the moon" ' and not have to worry about whether 'location' is a
child element or an attribute.  The distinction seems to impose a
requirement that the queryer(new word?) know the XML structure of a document
And yes, SQL does have the same limitation (it helps to know the table you
want), but that doesn't strike me as a justification. To be able to treat
attributes as children would alleviate this problem, although it may create
others of which I am currently (blissfully) ignorant.  Of course, the
functionality could always be introduced at a higher level, and it may be
more appropriate there, but I'm not sure why.

Thanks again,
Linda

>
> 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.
>
>


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