xml-dev - Re: Should we care about elements order ?

[Joseph Kesselman/Watson/IBM <keshlam@us.ibm.com>]

In the subject line, which "we" are you talking about?

Some XML applications are sensitive to the order in which elements occur.
Some aren't. Many care in one part of the document and not in others. (Some
spoken languages are fully inflected, some are fully positional, most are a
mix.)

Remember that DTDs and schemas are almost never going to be able to enforce
all the rules of the language by themselves. They provide a basic
well-formedness check, equivalent to making sure that the statement is in
the right language. Determining whether the statement makes sense often
requires additional checks at the semantic level.

There's no magic here. Do what makes sense for the particular XML-based
language you're designing and the applications which will process it. Use
schemas for what schemas can do; use custom code for what they can't do.

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Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research