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On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 11:31 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
> >
> > > The XML 1.0 well-formedness definition specifically states that
> > > attributes are unordered, but says nothing about elements.
> > > This means that technically speaking, a conforming XML parser
> > > might decide to report the child elements of memo in Listing 1
> > > in any order.
> >
> > Good grief!
> >
>
> It's worse than that, a conforming XML parser might decide only to report
> half the elements, and to rename them all as foobar.
>
> The reporting requirements in the XML spec are notoriously incomplete.
> Fortunately most writers of XML parsers want their products to be not only
> conformant, but useful.
It's worth pointing out that I've never heard anyone discussing whether
their XML parser is allowed to omit half the elements, but the question
of whether or not a parser is constrained to report elements in parse
order comes up fairly frequency, including several times on this very
list.
That's the reason I decided that touching on the point in the article
was worthwhile.
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org
Use CSS to display XML, part 2 - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss2-i.html
XML Output with 4Suite & Amara - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/20/py-xml.html
Use XSLT to prepare XML for import into OpenOffice Calc - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-oocalc/
Schema standardization for top-down semantic transparency - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think31.html
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