Re: [xml-dev] An elegant implementation of an XML graph traversal

[Chris Burdess <dog@bluezoo.org>]

Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Thus, the XML document is a graph

The XML document is not a graph. It is merely an instance of a format in which you have created a language for describing a graph. No general purpose XML tool will ever encounter anything cyclic in your document. Therefore the cyclic properties are nothing to do with XML and are confined to your language, which could be represented in XML or any number of other forms - you could write your language in ASN.1, but it doesn't mean that ASN.1 has cyclic properties and we have to worry about infinite loops when we use ASN.1 tools.

For general information about traversing cyclic graphs while avoiding infinite loops, Google is more than sufficient. XML has absolutely nothing to do with it.