Re: [xml-dev] Can we treat XML elements and attributes as sets

[Mukul Gandhi <mukul_gandhi@yahoo.com>]

Hi Richard,
  Thanks for the explanation. Now I have an unrelated
question. I have read in some XML vocabularies(like
XSLT for example), that information is treated as
sets. But these sets(as referred in XML) are ordered.
But in mathematics I believe, sets are defined as
unordered collection of items. 

My question is, I believe, set terminology in XML is
borrowed from mathematics(and, is it true?), then why
the difference of ordered and unordered is kept?
Could'nt we had a different terminology? This I
believe all confuses mathematicians :)

Regards,
Mukul

--- Richard Tobin <richard@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Presumably he means that any element or attribute is
> in the set of
> elements or attributes for some namespace (including
> "no namespace").
> These sets are disjoint in the sense that no element
> in, say, the XSL
> namespace is also in the XML Schema namespace.  If
> I'm interpreting it
> correctly, the staement is certainly true.

> The idea of elements and attributes being "in"
> namespaces, and of
> namespaces being objects, has not been widely
> reflected in languages
> and APIs.  Instead, namespaces are usually applied
> more directly to
> *names*, with a name being considered a compound
> object with a
> namespace part and a local part.  So in XSLT for
> example you don't
> ask whether an element is in a namespace, but
> whether the namespace
> uri part of its name has some value.
> 
> -- Richard


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