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

[Don Park <donpark@docuverse.com>]

As I said before, "not all elements are created equal," meaning that most
data structures tend to exhibit some natural grouping behavior.  There are
several types of group dependencies:

1. parent-child
2. siblings
3. generation

* Parent-Child

This type of dependency can be divided into several sub-types in terms of
direction and ancestry like this:

1.1 child-parent: meaning of child depends on its parent (most common)
1.2 parent-child: meaning of parent depends on its content (i.e. modifiers)
1.3 child-ancestor: meaning of child depends on its ancestors (accumulative
sematics)
1.4 ancestor-child: meaning of ancestors depends on its content (very rare)

* Siblings

"Road Sign" design pattern is a frequent cause of these dependencies where
some preceding element affects elements that follows.  Usually, effects of
Road-Sign elements are limited to by parent and generation.

* Generation

You run across these when you have two or more dependent hierarchies like
<table> structure in which sub-elements of <thead> and <tbody> has
generational dependencies.

Best,

Don Park
Docuverse