In article <pan.2009.01.30.23.41.47.185358@r...>,
Jules  <jules.richardsonnews@r...> wrote:

>Fair enough - but from a parser point of view, what's the correct
>behaviour if multiple blocks of text are found amongst multiple "sub
>elements"? Should the parser somehow concatenate the blocks and present a
>single text string at the API layer? Or should it present multiple blocks
>as individual strings?

Concatenating the immediate text children would almost never be the
right thing.  Mixed content is rarely used in data-oriented XML, but
is very common in traditional text markup (such as XHTML).  Typically
the child elements will contain further text, for example

  This is <em>important</em>.

so concatenating the child text would give you "This is." which
is not likely to be useful.

Concatenating all the text descendants makes more sense - in this case
it would give you "This is important." - but in effect you are
stripping out the markup, so it's unlikely to be the main use of
the document.

-- Richard
-- 
Please remember to mention me / in tapes you leave behind.