XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The Tree Structure of an XML Document

An XML document is a tree made up of nodes. Some nodes contain one or more other nodes. There is exactly one root node, which ultimately contains all other nodes. XPath is a language for picking nodes and sets of nodes out of this tree. From the perspective of XPath, there are seven kinds of nodes:

• The root node

• Element nodes

• Text nodes

• Attribute nodes

• Comment nodes

• Processing-instruction nodes

• Namespace nodes

One thing to note are the constructs not included in this list: CDATA sections, entity references, and document type declarations. XPath operates on an XML document after all these items have been merged into the document. For instance, XPath cannot identify the first CDATA section in a document or tell whether a particular attribute value was directly included in the source element start-tag or merely defaulted from the declaration of the element in a DTD.

Consider the document in Example 9-1. This exhibits all seven kinds of nodes. Figure 9-1 is a diagram of the tree structure of this document.

Example 9-1. The example XML document used in this chapter

<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="application/xml" href="people.xsl"?> <!DOCTYPE people [ <!ATTLIST homepage xlink:type CDATA #FIXED "simple" xmlns:xlink CDATA #FIXED "http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <!ATTLIST person id ID #IMPLIED> ]> <people> <person born="1912" died="1954" id="p342"> <name> <first_name>Alan</first_name> <last_name>Turing</last_name> </name> <!-- Did the word computer ...