Re: [xml-dev] Are subelements significant by themselves?

[mrossi@csc.com]

Unfortunately, the answer to all these questions is a big "it depends".
Depending on what your app needs to do with your data, it may need to know
about the element's parent. It may need to know about the element's whole
ancestory, or the entire hierarchy in which it's contained. On the other
hand I can think of plenty of apps that would be perfectly useful simply
extracting the element itself.

Michael A. Rossi
Computer Sciences Corporation
mailto:mrossi@csc.com
856-983-4400 x4911


                                                                                                                   
                    Seairth                                                                                        
                    Jacobs               To:     xml-dev <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>                                   
                    <seairth@seai        cc:                                                                       
                    rth.com>             Subject:     [xml-dev] Are subelements significant by themselves?         
                                                                                                                   
                    10/03/01                                                                                       
                    11:01 AM                                                                                       
                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                   


Does an element have any useful significance without knowing the elements
above it?  In other words, without knowing anything about the parent
element(s) of a given child element, is the child element useful for
anything at all?

What if the child element belonged to a different namespace than the parent
element(s)?  Would an application that "understands" that namespace be able
to process the child element without knowing anything about the parent
element(s)?


If there any applications of this out there, can some of them be mentioned?

---
Seairth Jacobs
seairth@seairth.com