Nadia,
While you are trying to apply David's solution I'd recommend you also test
XMetaL to see whether the assumption he makes in his code (the PI pairs are
"well-balanced" with respect to element markup) is correct, or whether
XMetaL cannot in fact insert such a PI wherever it likes, thereby breaking
the implicit "containment" and presenting, in effect, an overlap problem.
(The "virtual" elements demarcated by the PI-pairs overlap the XML's own
element structures.)
While I haven't myself tested XMetaL for this, I fear and suspect this is
the case.
Overlap problems are notoriously hard for XML technologies in general, and
there is a considerable (and growing) literature on the topic. It's
sometimes referred to as "multiple concurrent hierarchies". The various
approaches to dealing with this vary quite a bit depending on the actual
processing requirements for the system (e.g. projects that work with stable
and complete datasets can do things very differently from systems that have
to deal with new data all the time), and include proposals to step outside
XML altogether. This is because, better than any other example I can think
of in XML tech, they demonstrate the engineering principle (or Cosmic Law
of Compensation, if you prefer) that where there's a gain, there's a loss.
In this case, XML's clumsiness at dealing with this (or more precisely,
XSLT's) is a consequence of our establishing the tree as our data model of
choice.
Keywords you might Google:
SGML CONCUR
markup overlap
multiple concurrent hierarchies
TexMECS
JITTS
LMNL
Cheers,
Wendell
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