Essential XML: Beyond Markup

Chapter 3. Navigation

http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=190

Anonymous, 1995

The Infoset describes the abstract model of an XML document based largely on its logical structure. The Infoset's definition implies intrinsic hierarchiccal relationships (e.g., parent, child, descendant) between the information items of a given document. These intrinsic relationships can assist in formally addressing subsets of a document (e.g., 'give me the all child elements named bob whose id attribute is not id-xyz'). Where the Infoset stops short is in defining a uniform syntax for addressing and identifying these subsets.

In the absence of such syntax, it's impossible for an attribute or element to reference another portion of the same document in a uniform ...