RE: Elements order:

[Murali Mani <mani@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

hello everyone,

data modeling has many important tools. they manifest themselves in
programming languages as the different kinds of data structures provided
-- three important data structures provided are -- set, bag, list

data modeling without at least these three constructs, I believe, are
difficult. I say data modeling because when you are writing a schema, I
will say that what you are doing is data modeling.

XML does provide important list construct by the order of children etc.
But sometimes what is missing is the set/bag construct. Saying that
unordered content is not needed, I believe, is not correct.

In SGML, the unordered set of children could be specified using the any
order construct (specified as &) -- there is a problem with the original
any order construct specified in SGML -- the problem is that it is not a
binary operator -- in other words, (a & b & c) is not the same as
((a & b) & c)

therefore the new documents (TREX, RELAX NG, and XML Query Algebra) use
shuffle product (or interleaved product) for any order. The shuffle
product is different from any order -- for example,

(a* & b*) where & is shuffle product is equivalent to the regular
expression (a | b)*.

you will be able to find more material about shuffle product from TREX and
RELAX NG specifications.

regards - murali.

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Nicolas LEHUEN wrote:

> >I disagree there - I like to be able to encode Asian and
> >western names in
> >their proper cultural order but still know which is the given
> >and which is
> >the family name.
> >
> >-Chris
>
> Well the given name can be found in /person/name/text() and the family name
> is in /person/surname/text(). I don't care about the givenname being encoded
> before the familyname or not in the document.
>
> Regards,
> Nicolas
>
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