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At 11:05 AM -0400 10/6/02, W. E. Perry wrote: >Patrick: Do you have only a single root? >Pierre: Certainly not. > >Patrick: How many roots do you have? >Pierre: At least as many roots as I have leaves. > >Fascinating premises from which to begin a re-thinking of tree-formed >entities. > Indeed. I've been thinking today about mini-trees as you and John Cowan have suggested to me recently, but based on this it suddenly hits me that every node in the tree is a root. Going back to data structures 201, you can pick up any node, hoist it to the top and let its parent become a child as the entire tree shifts around and falls in place. Think of washers tied to other washers with strings. The physical image is a lot more compelling than the abstract one. Does this have any use for XML? Is there any point to letting the root shift from one node to another while still keeping everything in the tree? Does this enable any processing models or solve any problems? -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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