On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 05:40:56PM +0100, Robin Berjon wrote:Efficient annotation and traversal would go a long way, but almost all useful XML representations have loops unfortunately.
By loop you mean attributes declared by DTD as IDREFs and pointing to element having the same value for the attribut ID?
In a way IDREF are similar to symlinks? they cannot create "real loops" because they are not followed by default by traversal tool juste like find does not follow symlinks by default.
Part of the problem doesn't involve referencing. Practically all XML representations will have at the very least children pointing back to their parents, and probably more than just that.
Another part of the problem is that, indeed IDREFs, QName links, internal XLinks, or other referencing approaches can be treated as symlinks and in fact more or less currently are. However that's often suboptimal/inefficient to implement because either you point to the target (in which case you have a cycle) or you have to look for it. If we want to make things better than they are currently, that kind of loop needs to be simple and efficient.
-- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
