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

• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 21:49:23 -0500

At 09:15 PM 3/29/01 -0500, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>FWIW. I have come to believe that XML is really all about loose
>typing and "derivation by extension", where the type is really
>determined by the structure of the data, rather than by type
>graphs based upon type identifiers (as found in JAVA et al.).
>
>This is why I see type as something you project onto an XML
>instance: you can test to see if it conforms to a type, and
>thereby declare that it is/is not of that type, but the data
>is not intrinsically of *any* type. This unifies "implements",
>"extends", "is-a" and "has-a".

Beautiful stuff, that is.

>In such a world, unordered parameter lists/attribute lists
>make a great deal of sense...

Sure.  But you might also want to be able to use the order of said lists as 
one criteria for applying said type.

I'm not really sure what good it does to specify that order is discarded 
entirely, though at least I suspect it does less harm than claiming that 
all namespace prefix information should be discarded entirely.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

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