On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 03:45, S Woodside wrote:
> On Monday, April 21, 2003, at 07:45  PM, Peter Flynn wrote:
> 
> > It's important not to forget that Document people had been dealing
> > with this stuff for over a decade before XML.
> 
> Does the XPath syntax predate XML?

It's actually XPointer that inherited some of the TEI Extended
Pointer Notation, but the concept of using a formatted string 
to address a fragment of a document was well established (eg 
in HyTime) by the time XML arrived.

> > Only for the default case, where elements are presented for
> > processing in document order (and I don't see how else it could
> > be written...). Anything else it's XSLT (or rather, the programmer)
> > which is in charge.
> 
> Would you say that the default case is also "usually" (or at least for 
> teaching purposes) also the "best" way? (modulo all the usual 
> disclaimers)

For "document" XML, probably. Traditional text documents tend to be 
read sequentially. For "data" applications there probably is no
"right" order, but most data documents [sic] I have seen tend to be
modelled on a top-down basis, so they bear a resemblance to the way
the same data would have been laid out for human reading.

///Peter



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