Re: location set vs. location list

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> 
> The current XPointer working draft states in section 2:
> 
> [Definition: location-set]
>  An ordered list of locations, such as produced by an   XPointer
> expression. This corresponds
>  to the node-set that is produced by XPath expressions,
>  except for the generalization to
>  include points and ranges.
> 
> Actually, this corresponds to XPath's node list, not to XPath's node
> set. The difference is that a node set is unordered according to both
> the standard meaning of the word "set" and to the XPath 1.0 spec, which
> states in section 1:
> 
>   node-set (an unordered collection of nodes without duplicates)

Hi Elliotte. Andrew Watt pointed this out on January 18th
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2001JanMar/0039.html)
and I repeated it on January 30th
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2001JanMar/0054.html)
There hasn't been any response from the WG though. (Not that they're obliged
to, but sometimes they do.)

> This should be able to be fixed with editorial changes without changing
> any of the functionality of XPointer. However, the editorial changes
> might be large, particularly if you change the term "location set" to
> "location list" (whihc I would recommend, assuming you really did intend
> that location sets be ordered).

I don't think there's any need for location-sets to be ordered, just as
there's no need for node-sets to be ordered in XPath. It would easier to
simply change "An ordered list of locations" to "An unordered list of
locations".

-Michael Dyck