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RE: questions re WD-xml-infoset-20001220

• From: Mike.Champion@S...
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001 00:23:53 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: james anderson [mailto:james.anderson@a...]
> Sent: Monday, January 01, 2001 7:29 PM
> To: www-xml-infoset-comments@w...; xml-dev@l...
> Subject: questions re WD-xml-infoset-20001220
>
>
> 1. why don't attributes have a parent?

I presume the InfoSet did this to be consistent with the DOM.  It is a rather subtle
semantic (or perhaps pedantic) point, I guess, but the children
of a DOM Element are any sub-elements. Attributes are not children
of an Element ... so the element should not be the parent of the attributes.
[How could I have a parent, if I am not a child of that parent? Ponder that ...]
The DOM uses the ownerElement property to identify the element that
contains a specific attribute. 

The discussion for all this will be in the W3C member-confidential archives of the DOM
Interest Group ... If you are affiliated with the W3C, see the thread starting at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-dom-ig/1998Jun/0017.html

In the public mailing lists, I find a discussion (explaining the decision) starting at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/1999OctDec/0086.html

Also, we had a discussion of this on xml-dev a year or so ago:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200001/msg00877.html

Interestingly, the XPath/XSLT data model does not make this semantic/pedantic
distinction, so is one of the little inconsistencies in the W3C worldview that the
InfoSet people have the unenviable job of trying to sort out.

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