On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 03:45, S Woodside wrote:
On Monday, April 21, 2003, at 07:45 PM, Peter Flynn wrote:
It's important not to forget that Document people had been dealing
with this stuff for over a decade before XML.
Does the XPath syntax predate XML?
It's actually XPointer that inherited some of the TEI Extended
Pointer Notation, but the concept of using a formatted string
to address a fragment of a document was well established (eg
in HyTime) by the time XML arrived.
Only for the default case, where elements are presented for
processing in document order (and I don't see how else it could
be written...). Anything else it's XSLT (or rather, the programmer)
which is in charge.
Would you say that the default case is also "usually" (or at least for
teaching purposes) also the "best" way? (modulo all the usual
disclaimers)
For "document" XML, probably. Traditional text documents tend to be
read sequentially. For "data" applications there probably is no
"right" order, but most data documents [sic] I have seen tend to be
modelled on a top-down basis, so they bear a resemblance to the way
the same data would have been laid out for human reading.
///Peter
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