Re: "Roots" of confusion introduced at W3C (shortish)

I would like to ask a short and simple question to which, at present, there 
may be no short and simple answer.

I hope someone from W3C will contribute an answer.

The background to the question is explained in earlier posts in the thread 
and in earlier threads.

When writing about XML and its family of technologies today is it possible to 
use a single, unambiguous term for each of the following two concepts - 

1. what in the XPath Recommendation is represented as the "root node" (also 
referred to as the "document root") and 

2. what the XML 1.0 Recommendation calls the "document element"?

Given that increasingly there is use of multiple XML technologies surely it 
is important to unambiguously be able to refer to these "things". <grin> ... 
I can't call them "entities" since in XML 1.0 that means something else 
entirely. :)

What I want to avoid is having to repeatedly write things like, "Let's take a 
closer look at the blah blah (which is called the doo da in XPath and the 
widget in DOM and the whatsit in SVG)".

May I propose that the following be the standard terms:

For item 1. - "document root"

For item 2. - "element root"

I believe we do need some clear, unambigous, non-clumsy way to communicate 
these ideas across XML technologies. I don't believe that way currently 
exists.

Andrew Watt

Received on Friday, 22 September 2000 02:46:28 UTC