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Kimberly.Hahn@enform.com writes:
> Keep in mind that a given application may have some attribute sequence
> requirements that a developer put into place for that application.
Andrew Watt writes:
> If there are attribute sequence *requirements* then I don't think the
> document is XML, although it may be similar in all other respects. By
> definition, in XML, attribute order is not important.
This is certainly true for any application for which the infoset
provides the basis for the data model.
On the other hand, I'll suggest that tools which need to modify XML
documents (XML editors) will often want to make the smallest possible
change to a document so humans won't be surprised when unrelated parts
of the document change in what is essentially a superficial way. A
user who regularly edits documents using simple text editors will
often arrange attributes for readability, and will be frustrated when
a tool changes things around.
The distinction between applications that need to care and those
that don't can probably be described as the difference between
applications for which XML *contains* the data and those for which XML
*is* the data. For the former, XML syntax is simply the box that
contains application-specific information. For the latter, the XML
itself is what the application is concerned with.
-Fred
--
Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation
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