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RE: [Fwd: FW: "Roots" of confusion introduced at W3C]


A root is always the root of a tree.  I don't believe the W3C ever speaks of
a "root" without it being the root of a tree.  The question is what kind of
tree, as you point out.  The physical document tree or the logical tree.
And then, which kind of logical tree (DOM, XPath, etc.).

There is no such thing as a "subtree root".  If you're talking about an XSLT
variable tree, you're talking about a *new* tree, not a sub-tree.  There is
no contradiction here.

The "real concept" is that a tree always has just one root.  And it makes
sense to call the root the "root", whatever kind of tree you're talking
about.

Evan Lenz
elenz@xyzfind.com
http://www.xyzfind.com
XYZFind, the search engine *designed* for XML
Download our free beta software: http://www.xyzfind.com/beta



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xsl-list@mulberrytech.com
[mailto:owner-xsl-list@mulberrytech.com]On Behalf Of Joseph
Kesselman/Watson/IBM
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Fwd: FW: "Roots" of confusion introduced at W3C]



Andrew Watt's point about terminology mismatches is probably valid.

Part of the problem here is that there are multiple legitimate definitions
of "root". The question is, root of _what_?

It may mean the root element of a document, which the DOM calls  the
Document Element.

Or it may mean the root of the tree in which case you have to specify
what kind of tree you're talking about. I believe XPath's definition of
root node corresponds roughly to the DOM's Document node.  But the DOM may
have detached trees whose (tree) root may be a different kind of node. And
some folks  have argued that XPath should be usable on subtrees/nodesets
other than full documents, which would require a similar concept of a
local/contextual root.

There may be other variations.

It seems to me that if we're going to reconcile these, we have to first
enumerate and describe what the real concepts are. Then we can figure out
which are and aren't similar enough to use the same name... and what names
to use. We may in fact discover that the term "root" really should apply to
more than one but has to be qualfied into "document root" versus "subtree
root" versus some other flavor(s).

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research


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