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

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Gavin Thomas Nicol)


>
> Right, but if you view attributes at "attributes of a type", and
> content as "attributes of a type" (syntactic sugar), we get into
> a funky world where one asks why you can't specify the ordering
> of attributes as you can content. This is kind of where the
> SML folk were coming from.

The question of "order" is separate from that of a "type".  In relational
databases, each returned row can be seen as an instance of a type (a la C.
J. Date), but the components of that type form a set, not a list.

Maybe you could view an element as being instances of two types at the same
time: the type defined by the attribute set and the type defined by the
non-attribute content.  What a wierd thought!

Cheers,

Tom P