XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Document disassembly techniques

There are at least two database technologies that have been exploited to disassemble XML documents in order to create a component management system. But, before discussing these techniques, it is beneficial to understand what document disassembly actually involves.

Disassembly principles

Consider the following document fragment:

<para>An example
<em>paragraph<xref idref="#para"/></em>
that demonstrates
<em>disassembly</em>
into hierarchical structures.</para>

Breaking this fragment down into its components reveals three levels of structure. The Paragraph element has a total of five children, including two elements and three pseudo-elements (text strings). The first Emphasis element has two children: first a pseudo-element, ...