RE: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 05:01 PM 29/03/01 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>At 11:33 AM 3/29/01 -0500, Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com wrote:
>>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...
>
>Sure - I was just pointing out that the rule was something of a latecomer 
>to XML 1.0, appearing only in the Second Edition.  It's certainly explicit, 
>but I think there's plenty of good reason to question why that was seen as 
>important enough to rate an explicit change to the spec.

Er, well, <blushing>attribute order is explicitly not sigificant
in SGML, and so everyone "just knew" that the same was true in
XML, and in fact all the software was written that way, and 
the 1.0 spec's failure to say so was a huge gaping 900-foot
plastic erratum, which is now fixed.</blushing> -Tim