On Dec 13, 2004, at 18:14, Chiusano Joseph wrote:
> Oh - I should be clearer. With the approach just above (#1 through #6),
> if you wanted to process the XML document to find a particular element
> (or set of elements), you would have to use a positional approach
> rather
> than an approach based on a specific element name.
Correct.
> If you have optional
> elements whose inclusion in an XML document various instance by
> instance, the positional approach would break.
Correct. This is why such a structure would be restricted to sequential
key-value pairs.
If you need additional information (for example for a TreeMap [1]),
this could be perhaps modeled either as a different element or perhaps
by adding a type attribute to the map element.
Cheers,
PA.
[1] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/TreeMap.html
