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RE: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)

• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@e...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 06:32:51 -0500

> My view is that fixing any order where none is required is
> gratuitous, taxing and goes against the
> spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-medicine-go-down principle; with this view,
> allowing arbitrary order is good because it does not require generators to
> (have to worry about code to) sort the attributes in ways redundant for
> naming purposes.

Right, but if you view attributes at "attributes of a type", and
content as "attributes of a type" (syntactic sugar), we get into
a funky world where one asks why you can't specify the ordering
of attributes as you can content. This is kind of where the
SML folk were coming from.

FWIW. I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have a schema
language that had provision for attribute ordering validation,
but I agree that this will almost always be *way* overkill.

I'm actually amazed that SGML is as *usable* as it
is (really!)... when you think of all the alternatives
to unordered attributes, none is anywhere nearly as appealing.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@h...>
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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>

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