Re: "Roots" of confusion introduced at W3C

[Joe English <jenglish at flightlab dot com>]

AndrewWatt2000@aol.com wrote:

> The following terms are used for the ROOT of the document (of which the
> "element root" or "root element" is a child) i.e. these are all different
> terms used for the same thing in W3C documents, as I understand it.
>
> XML 1.0 - "document entity" (Section 4.8). The terms "root node" and
> "document root" do not occur in the XML 1.0 Recommendation.

I think [4.8 "Document Entity"] is using the term "entity"
in the SGML sense: that is, it's an abstract storage location.

In this sense, the "document entity" is not part of the Infoset;
rather, it is the thing which is fed to a parser in order
to *produce* an infoset.


> In addition XML 1.0 confuses the issue by using the term "document entity"
> to, apparently, refer to both the root of the tree (Section 4.8) and also the
> whole serialised document.

I think it only refers to the serialized document.
Not the _whole_ serialized document though, since
parts of it may be included via entity references.

 . . .

You know, this was all much easier to understand when
everybody just called everything "tags" :-)



--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com


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