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Bryce K. Nielsen wrote:
> I don't mean to keep bringing this up, but a lot of posts I read here talk
> about elements being ordered, so I'm often confused since I've always
> thought one of the powers of XML was the ability to allow unordered
> elements?
When you invent an XML language, you can write rules that say the
elements have to be in a particular order, or you can write rules saying
they can come in any order. Whatever schema language you're using, the
unordered case tends to be a little more work to declare properly, but
it usually can be done.
Whether or not you're validating, all the runtime APIs to XML allow the
application to find out what order the elements were in the XML
document, and this information is part of the XML Information Set. So
in general it's correct to say that elements *are* ordered and the order
*can be* significant. However, you may choose neither to enforce any
particular orderat validation nor use this information at runtime. -Tim
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