Ordering of XML elements

[Bill Van Valkenburgh <billv@firstlogic.com>]

This is a bit of a newbie question. But needs to be asked.

I have an application under development where input is in the form of XML
documents. I have some fields which ordering is important. For example:

<input-fields>
   <param> "a" </param>
   <param> "b" </param>
   <param> "c" </param>
</input-fields>

My customers will be using whatever XML editor they desire to generate files
like this. The order of the param elements is significant. So my question
is: can I depend on an XML editor to write out the param elements in the
order shown in the customer's XML editor? Does the XML specification say
that the order of elements with equivalent names is significant?

I assume the answer is yes, but before I ship a product to my customer's I
thought it would be worth asking. I could use element names:param1, param2,
... , if this is not true.

Bill VanValkenburgh