DR 10-0020 — General: Terminology, ‘parent’

[Chris Rae]

http://cid-c8ba0861dc5e4adc.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public%20Documents/2010/DR-10-0020.docx

Me again. The above DR concerns use of the word "parent" when not concerning XML parent elements (e.g. "the cell that is in the last column of the parent table").

I started looking through Part 1 for the instances of this use of "parent" and there are many of them. There are around 2500 instances of "parent" outside boilerplate text and my brief investigation would suggest that most of these are not using the word in the context of an XML parent.

Each of these cases will have to be dealt with independently as I don't think we can blanket-change them to "current". This represents rather a lot of work and I'm not wholly convinced as to the benefit of fixing this DR versus addressing others. "Parent" is used elsewhere to describe similar concepts and in all of the cases I found where the text really did mean "XML parent", the wording was always "Parent element" or "Parent XML element". I notice that ODF has the same characteristic (whenever "parent" is used to describe XML parents).

I'd like to reject this DR on the basis that this use of them term is consistent with other standards. However, if we come across any instances of "parent" referring to a parent XML element without using "parent element" or "parent XML element", I think we ought to log DRs for those.

Your thoughts,

Chris