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Re: technical term (and reference) for "XML fragment"

• From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
• To: "'xml-dev@lists.xml.org '" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:27:40 +1100

Julian Reschke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> what's the preferred technical term (and a precise reference) for the 
> thing that's frequently called an "XML fragment" (*)?
>
> In the XML spec, <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-content> seems to 
> be the right production, but "content" does not work well as term used 
> outside the XML spec's context...
>
> Feedback appreciated, Julian 
There are a lot of different possibilities, especially depending on what 
kind of information you are dealing with (text, markup, infoset, 
trees):  element, range, fragment, branch, entity.

It may be that the term you are looking for is "section".  XML has one 
kind of marked section in elements, the CDATA marked section, but SGML 
has others not necessarily synchronous with element structure.  If we 
can speak of a marked section, I don't see why we cannot speak of 
unmarked sections too.

Perhaps  "range" would be better kept for regions defined over the 
infoset (range is defined in XPointer, to its failure), while "section" 
would be better for regions defined over the markup or raw text.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• References:
  • technical term (and reference) for "XML fragment"
    • From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>