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Re: Parents disinherit their children

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> However, I'm concerned about the logical inconsistency in this
> statement as currently written. In common usage, both technical and
> genealogical, the statement that A is the parent of B clearly implies
> that B is the child of A. Why is this common understanding of
> language broken here? Is there anything that can be done to fix it?

The distinction goes back to the Infoset, which XPath makes use of.

Notice that an element's children have an ordering whereas attribute and
namespace nodes do not (and "children" in common usage have an ordering).

Here is a way of looking at it that softens the apparent inconsistency:

A parent has children and other properties (attributes / namespace nodes).
The properties still belong to the parent so you can ask "what is the parent
to which these properties belong?".

It's not perfect (in particular, a "parent" might not have any children) but
I just though of it then! :-)

James Tauber


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