The end of DELTA?

[Susan B. Farmer]

>Could one constrain further by expressing within the schema the hierarchical
>relationships between the elements(eg 'blade' and 'petiole' as child
>elements of leaf') or would the introduction of terminology into the
>'standard' be a step too far?
>

Putting on my programmer hat here, those kinds of things should be about
to be included in whatever XML standards were set up relatively transparent
to the user.  For instance, "leaf" by default would contain certain properties
(size, shape, petiole, base, apex, number, arrangement, location) that
the user could code or mark as non-existant withought having to worry
aout the "parent/child" or other object relationship.  Folk who want to
*write* software that uses the XML (or whatever) standard would be the
ones to worry about those issues.

Susan Farmer
sfarmer at goldsword.com
Botany Department, University of Tennessee
http://www.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Trillium