> -----Original Message-----
>
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 9:49 AM
> To:
Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject:
attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information
models)
>
>
> At 09:04 AM 3/29/01 -0500,
Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com wrote:
> >As for the order of
attributes, doesn't XML 1.0 specifically
> declare this to be
insignificant?
>
> I've taken that on faith for a while, though I'm
wondering
> more and more
> about how wise that decision really
was. It's not in Tim Bray's
> annotations - it only explicitly
appears in the second edition:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-starttags (para after prod 41)
Thanks for looking this up! But, uhhh, "Note that the order of attribute specifications in a start-tag or empty-element tag is not significant" is pretty explicit. I think the InfoSet has gone a bit far in implying the insignificance of various things that databases and editors need to preserve, but I wouldn't want to have anything to do with an effort to imply significance to things that XML 1.0 defines as NOT significant.
I just remembered one other thing that the InfoSet doesn't model that has generated some discussion about round-trippability --- the two legal XML syntaxes for empty elements. Does anyone care about round-tripping the specific syntax used in some instance, e.g. <empty></empty> vs <empty/> ? There was some discussion on SML-DEV once about using it to encode the distinction between an element with the value [empty string] vs an element with the value "null" ... but the fact that the distinction wouldn't necessarily survive a round-trip with an InfoSet-compliant tool put that idea to rest.