[Bug 5002] Wrong use of the term "root node" in the XDM spec

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=5002





------- Comment #1 from mike@saxonica.com  2007-09-05 12:08 -------
Personal response: although there's a tortuous history here, involving
differences of terminology between XML 1.0, XPath 1.0, and XDM, I don't think
the XDM spec can be faulted for these definitions. You are reading "root node"
as if it were a kind of node, which is a reasonable misunderstanding given the
history, but XDM makes it very plain in the section you are quoting that being
a root is essentially a relationship between a node and a tree.

It's true that the spec uses the term "root node" without a formal definition,
but the sentence "Nodes form a tree that consists of a root node plus all the
nodes that are reachable directly or indirectly from the root node" is pretty
close to a formal definition (of both "root" and "tree") and certainly seems
adequate to me.

Received on Wednesday, 5 September 2007 12:09:03 UTC