RE: "Roots" of confusion introduced at W3C (shortish)

["DuCharme, Robert" <Robert.DuCharme@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>For item 1. - "document root"
>For item 2. - "root element"

"Root element" already has a specific meaning: the root of a tree
representing a document's logical structure. "Document root" already has a
vague meaning, and will continue to do so. Documents don't really have
roots, anyway--tree representations of them do, and the presence of
different tree representations is what makes the concept of "document root"
so vague. We can't retroactively make this vague term mean something more
specific.

>With respect to the XPath date model, these two are
>the "document root node" and the "root element node".

Calling the XPath tree's root the "document root" doesn't distinguish it
from the roots of the DOM, element, or entity trees, all of which represent
a document and have a root. 

Section 5 of the XPath Rec says "XPath operates on an XML document as a
tree. This section describes how XPath models an XML document as a
tree...The relationship of this model to the XML Information Set [XML
Infoset] is described in [Appendix B XML Information Set Mapping]." This
Appendix B is the kind of effort toward clearing up the confusion that I
described in an earlier post.

Section 3 of the XSLT spec says "The data model used by XSLT is the same as
that used by XPath with the additions described in this section." 

So, while I can't find any W3C use of the term "XPath tree root" or even
"XPath tree" (there are other uses of the latter on the Web) it does seem to
make the most sense when discussing XPath and XSLT data model issues.

Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@  
snee.com>  "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii


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