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Joshua Allen wrote:
> ...
>
> 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.
I find that these are most often handled by attributes. Probably part of
the tension in this discussion comes from people who have a natural
aversion to attributes trying to use elements as attributes.
> ... 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.
IMO, the usability problem with command lines is that sometimes options
are order sensitive and sometimes they are not. XML makes a clear
distinction: attributes are not order sensitive. Elements are. Except
when they aren't. Eric and others in this thread are arguing for the
"except when they aren't" becoming more common.
Another argument in favour of enforced ordering: decent XML editors will
insert the required elements in for you in the right order. But they
can't if order isn't enforced, because they don't know what order the
author wants. That's the irony of this discussion...we're saying "order
doesn't matter therefore force the user to choose it."
If you spend a little time in a decent XML editor you'll probably find
that enforcing an order does the user a favour by letting their tool
help them better. On the other hand, attributes are usually ideal for
the cases where order REALLY DOESN'T matter and the XML editor will
convey this by presenting the attributes in alphabetical order.
> 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.
Most of these can be handled with attributes. In a few cases the
limitations of attributes are really a problem but more often people
avoid them out of a minimalist distaste for an "extra feature." If XML
had structured attributes this whole discussion would go away.
Anyhow, the nature of the original question makes me nervous. We aren't
talking about a content model of the form:
<!ELEMENT x (a? & b? & c? & d? & e?)>
As I understood it, he wants more complex content model particles in the
options (that's why xsd:all isn't good enough). In my opinion, the
resulting content model is going to be quite confusing. XSD's
limitations may be arbitrary but IMO, they are (accidentally) pointing
him towards better content model design.
Paul Prescod
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