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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Should we care about elements order ?
Tim Bray <tbray@t...> writes:
> At 05:20 PM 20/10/00 +0200, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
> >1) Should we always pay attention to the relative order of the
> >elements within XML documents ?
>
> No. Tons of conventional business data is oblivious to the order of
> its fields, and one of the nice things about an RDBMS is that I can
> arrange for the rows of the table and the colums of a row to be in
> any order I like.
>
> XML is differentiated in that it is *possible* (not necessary) to
> deal with order-significant data. The most obvious examples where
> this is useful are in the publishing space, but there are others.
> In my opinion, this is the one aspect of XML that is the hardest to
> deal with when trying to apply traditional relational
> technology. -Tim
One of the underlying questions, which is in the original post but
hasn't come up in the followups, is in a situation where one *doesn't*
want to enforce element order, especially in which order groups of
elements from different namespaces occur, can one still perform
validation with any current/popular/recommended schema language?
A corollary is when you have a structure like this:
<aa xmlns="uri:a"
xmlns:b="uri:b"
xmlns:c="uri:c">
<b:b/>
<c:c/>
</aa>
and you have schemas available to you for uri:a, uri:b, but not uri:c.
Can you validate the structures for uri:a and uri:b, and still have
uri:a allow for elements, unvalidated internally, from other
namespaces, like uri:c?
It's not a big deal if the answer is "No", but it does mean that for
those applications the current/popular/recommended schema languages
won't/can't be used.
-- Ken
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