RE: Ordering of XML elements

[Michael Fitzgerald <mike@wyeast.net>]

Bill,

Looking at the question with regard to a DTD content model, in

<!ELEMENT input-fields (param+)>

an input-fields element can have one or more param elements. In this content
model, however with

<!ELEMENT input-fields (param1,param2,param3)>

you can have one each of param1, param2, and param3, in exactly that order,
as children of input-fields.

My question would be is the order of elements significant to you or the
content of those elements, which brings up different processing approaches,
such as with XSLT or XML Schema.

-Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Van Valkenburgh [mailto:billv@firstlogic.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 9:28 AM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Ordering of XML elements



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


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