Re: Link-3: Sets, Singletons, and Determinism

At 11:38 18/05/97 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>Although XML-link currently doesn't address this at all, the spec probably 
>follows the TEI principal of determinism; that is to say, you always get 
>exactly one location as the result of an xpointer (or in the case of spans, 
>two).
>
>If we are going to allow spans, and thus an xpointer to return N
>locations, where N>1, should we consider saying that all xpointers
>return sets of objects, and sometimes the size of the set is 1?  This
>would open up a whole bunch of interesting apps.
>
>On the other hand, it would make xpointers smell even more like queries
>and less like addresses, which makes me at least nervous.  We also
>have to be careful if we are going to (see a later message) allow
>sub-element addressing; then we'd have to say that either that is
>a set of one pseudo-element, or that xpointers can return either
>sets of elements or spans of characters.  

Do you mean

  {sets of elements} or {spans of characters}

or

  sets of (elements or spans of characters)

?

I think it actually

  {sets of elements} or {sets of spans of characters}

If your location source is a set of elements and you search within each
element for some word, then you get a set of spans of characters.  This
doesn't look very minimalist to me.

James

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 1997 04:15:32 UTC