RE: understanding trees

> 0. what is the difference between 'child' and 'descendant'? 
> is it right to
> presume that a child-node is the first node that stems from 
> some parent
> node while 'descendants' denote all the nodes that stem from 
> some parent?
>
The descendants of an element are the elements, text nodes, processing
instructions,
and comments (but not attributes) that occur textually between the start and
end tags of the element in the source XML document. The children of an
element X are those descendants of X that are not descendants of any
descendant of X.
 
> 1. what is the content of an element node? the spec says that 
> 'The *value* of an element node is the string that results from
concatenating all
> characters that are descendants of the element node in the 
> order in which they occur in the document.' so, if 'The children of an 
> element node are the element nodes, comment nodes, processing instruction 
> nodes and text
> nodes for its content.' what is meant by 'content' then? is there a
> hierarchical or coordinating relationship between them or are 
> they merely associated nodes?

The containing relationship is defined by the syntax of the XML source
document: an element contains everything between its start and end tags.

> 
> 2. am i right in assuming that 'attribute nodes' and 
> 'namespace nodes' are
> just associated with element nodes but don't have any 
> *relationship* with
> them?

They have a relationship/association with the containing element but it is
not the "child" relationship.

Mike Kay


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