"Deep-Equal Nodes" (Was: RE: [xsl] Can sets have order? )

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev at yahoo dot com>]

> Not the same node, yes, but nodes which have the same values for
> all
> their attributes and attributes of subelements (i.e., which are
> deep-equal).  Such nodes may be exchanged in the node set without
> changing the behavior of any XPath query.
> 

I regard the whole notion of "Deep-Equal Nodes" as a misconception:

1. It already confused people into thinking that indistinguishable
nodes could exist.

2. Letting such "indistinguishable" pairs of nodes in an xml document
has all problems and anomalies of non-normalized data.

3. This will also lead to artificially increasing the necessary memory
and processing time for an XML document.

How to avoid such nodes? Here's one simple way:

<node1 ID="id1">
  <!--  Any contents goes here -->
</node1>

<node2 RefID="id1"/>

Dimitre.


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