Table of contents

Appendices

5.2 Element Nodes

There is an element node for every element in the document. An element node has an [expanded-name] computed by expanding the QName of the element specified in the tag in accordance with the XML Namespaces Recommendation XMLNAMES. The namespace URI of the element's [expanded-name] will be null if the QName has no prefix and there is no applicable default namespace.

NOTE: 

In the notation of Appendix A.3 of XMLNAMES, the local part of the expanded-name corresponds to the type attribute of the ExpEType element; the namespace URI of the expanded-name corresponds to the ns attribute of the ExpEType element, and is null if the ns attribute of the ExpEType element is omitted.

The children of an element node are the element nodes, comment nodes, processing instruction nodes and text nodes for its content. Entity references to both internal and external entities are expanded. Character references are resolved.

The [string-value] of an element node is the concatenation of the [string-value] s of all text node [descendants] of the element node in document order.

Unique IDs[top]

An element node may have a unique identifier (ID). This is the value of the attribute that is declared in the DTD as type ID. No two elements in a document may have the same unique ID. If an XML processor reports two elements in a document as having the same unique ID (which is possible only if the document is invalid) then the second element in document order must be treated as not having a unique ID.

NOTE: 

If a document does not have a DTD, then no element in the document will have a unique ID.