On Jul 23, 2010, at 12:00 PM, Justin Edelson wrote: >> >> It seems we're playing fast and lose with the differences between a nodes >> name, it's "type" and it's ordinal position. > Not sure what you mean here. Every node needs a name. A node's name need > not have a relation to the node's type or ordinal position. >
In my mental model of a node, it has intrinsic attributes and external attributes. Price is an example of an intrinsic attribute specific to a LineItem Type is another example of an intrinsic attribute specific to all nodes. These are both explicitly part of the node. A lineItem has certain attributes, that a paragraph does not for example. A chapter for example may have a title, while a paragraph usually does not. The ordinal number of a lineItem in a collection of LineItems, for me, is an external attribute. It describes the location of the entity in its container. Re order the entities, sort them for example by price and not id, and each entity in the list ends up, potentially, with a new ordinal number. The name of a node, to me, feels like it should be an intrinsic property and that name should be independent of where it's stored in the document. So for me, and this is in my own little twisted model, mostly based on my experience with RDBMS, which probably makes that a flawed model for using with a JCR, using the ordinal number of a node as it's "name" feels so very wrong. But maybe I just have to get over myself and let go of my previously good, but what seems like currently flawed model. ;-) Tony
