Menu Specification Comments

[Heinrich Wendel]

On Sunday 15 June 2003 17:29, you wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-06-15 at 10:04, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> > On Sunday 15 June 2003 12:50, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > On Sun, 2003-06-15 at 05:26, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > > On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 08:37:06AM +0200, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> > > > > I said it needs a !unique! root element. Menu is not a unique
> > > > > element. It can (and does in most cases) appear multiply times in a
> > > > > .menu file.
> > > >
> > > > Ah, I see. I guess we have to add <useless-stupid-root-element>
> > > > element then. I will ask Liam or Daniel to explain why that is in the
> > > > XML spec. ;-)
> > >
> > > I've read the XML spec a number of times, and have never seen anything
> > > to indicate that a unique root is necessary.  It's just another
> > > element, like any other.  In fact, XML doesn't care which element you
> > > use as your root element.  Either Heinrich has misread the spec, or I
> > > have.
> >
> > "There is exactly one element, called the root, or document element, no
> > part of which appears in the content of any other element.]"
> > (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-well-formed
>
> Ah.  No, you've misread it.  What this is saying is that no part of the
> root (its start tag or its end tag) can be inside any other element's
> content.  It's also saying that no other element may have any of its
> parts outside of all other elements' content.  Basically, it's giving a
> special case of what constitutes proper nesting for the boundary case of
> a root element.
>
> When reading the spec, an element refers so a specific instance of, say,
> <foo/>, not to the generic class of all <foo/>'s.  The spec really does
> not care what names you use for elements, or which elements you use as
> the root.  In fact, people re-root XML documents all the time.  It's
> very common practice, and is one of the benefits of XML.  To quote:
>
> "This specification does not constrain the semantics, use, or (beyond
> syntax) names of the element types and attributes, except that names
> beginning with a match to (('X'|'x')('M'|'m')('L'|'l')) are reserved for
> standardization in this or future versions of this specification."
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-element

Thanx for clearing up my mind :)

>
> --
> Shaun
Heinrich :)