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> > <extract title="Be liberal on the relative order between children
> > elements"/>
>
> I disagree.
> "bother" the user with the responsibility of choosing an order. From
the
> user's point of view, the order matters unless they are told
otherwise.
That's an interesting point. I think the "user perspective" argument
becomes more difficult to back up when you have element content that
involves lots of optional children -- in those cases the user often
wants to be able to insert whichever elements matter without necessarily
worrying which order they come in. Imagine for example if command-line
apps were written to expect a certain order to command-line arguments.
It would certainly save people from having to write getopts.c, but would
actually be an *impediment* to usability and user expectations.
There are some scenarios where order naturally matters, and others where
the user *assumes* it will matter, but I think there are plenty of other
cases where users would be unpleasantly surprised by finding that order
matters.
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