Re: Accepting non-deterministic content models

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

"Roger L. Costello" wrote:
> 
> Hi Eric,
> 
> Consider this portion of an instance document:
> 
> <test>
>     <a>
> 
> When a parser gets to <a>, which "a" is it - the element declaration
> that is the immediate child of <xsd:choice>, or the element declaration
> that is an immediate child of <xsd:sequence>?  There's no way for the
> parser to know unless it "looks ahead" to the next element.  That's
> non-deterministic.  /Roger

Yes, I get it, but I find it confusing to say that the content model is
non deterministic.

The content model itself is deterministic, but (and I don't know how to
say it in one word) it happen to be non deterministic at a point in time
for parsers that do not look ahead and have a partial view on the schema
and is therefor considered as invalid by W3C XML Schema ;=) ...

I think it's important to keep in mind what are the limitations of the
tools we use and what are the conceptual limitations of the "objects"
that we manipulate.

Thanks for the clear explanation!

Eric

-- 
See you at XTech in San Diego.
             http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2001/view/e_spkr/790
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org      http://4xt.org           http://examplotron.org
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