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RE: Can we treat XML elements and attributes as sets

• To: "'Mukul Gandhi'" <mukul_gandhi@y...>,"'Richard Tobin'" <richard@i...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Can we treat XML elements and attributes as sets
• From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
• Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 13:34:24 +0100
• In-reply-to: <20050821035818.95477.qmail@w...>
• Thread-index: AcWmBOwIELsluyTUSNKNAwbeUPcD0QAR01TA

Mukul, I think you will find that any specification in the XML family that
uses the word "set" is referring to a collection that has no intrinsic or
significant order. If you think otherwise, please point to a specific
example.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mukul Gandhi [mailto:mukul_gandhi@y...] 
> Sent: 21 August 2005 04:58
> To: Richard Tobin; xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re:  Can we treat XML elements and 
> attributes as sets
> 
> Hi Richard,
>   Thanks for the explanation. Now I have an unrelated
> question. I have read in some XML vocabularies(like
> XSLT for example), that information is treated as
> sets. But these sets(as referred in XML) are ordered.
> But in mathematics I believe, sets are defined as
> unordered collection of items. 
> 
> My question is, I believe, set terminology in XML is
> borrowed from mathematics(and, is it true?), then why
> the difference of ordered and unordered is kept?
> Could'nt we had a different terminology? This I
> believe all confuses mathematicians :)
> 
> Regards,
> Mukul
> 
> --- Richard Tobin <richard@i...> wrote:
> > Presumably he means that any element or attribute is
> > in the set of
> > elements or attributes for some namespace (including
> > "no namespace").
> > These sets are disjoint in the sense that no element
> > in, say, the XSL
> > namespace is also in the XML Schema namespace.  If
> > I'm interpreting it
> > correctly, the staement is certainly true.
> 
> > The idea of elements and attributes being "in"
> > namespaces, and of
> > namespaces being objects, has not been widely
> > reflected in languages
> > and APIs.  Instead, namespaces are usually applied
> > more directly to
> > *names*, with a name being considered a compound
> > object with a
> > namespace part and a local part.  So in XSLT for
> > example you don't
> > ask whether an element is in a namespace, but
> > whether the namespace
> > uri part of its name has some value.
> > 
> > -- Richard
> 
> 
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• References:
  • Re: Can we treat XML elements and attributes as sets
    • From: Mukul Gandhi <mukul_gandhi@y...>

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