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At 11:05 AM -0400 10/6/02, W. E. Perry wrote:
>Patrick: Do you have only a single root?
>Pierre: Certainly not.
>
>Patrick: How many roots do you have?
>Pierre: At least as many roots as I have leaves.
>
>Fascinating premises from which to begin a re-thinking of tree-formed
>entities.
>
Indeed. I've been thinking today about mini-trees as you and John
Cowan have suggested to me recently, but based on this it suddenly
hits me that every node in the tree is a root. Going back to data
structures 201, you can pick up any node, hoist it to the top and let
its parent become a child as the entire tree shifts around and falls
in place. Think of washers tied to other washers with strings. The
physical image is a lot more compelling than the abstract one.
Does this have any use for XML? Is there any point to letting the
root shift from one node to another while still keeping everything in
the tree? Does this enable any processing models or solve any
problems?
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
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