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> > <extract title="Be liberal on the relative order between children > > elements"/> > > I disagree. > "bother" the user with the responsibility of choosing an order. From the > user's point of view, the order matters unless they are told otherwise. That's an interesting point. I think the "user perspective" argument becomes more difficult to back up when you have element content that involves lots of optional children -- in those cases the user often wants to be able to insert whichever elements matter without necessarily worrying which order they come in. Imagine for example if command-line apps were written to expect a certain order to command-line arguments. It would certainly save people from having to write getopts.c, but would actually be an *impediment* to usability and user expectations. There are some scenarios where order naturally matters, and others where the user *assumes* it will matter, but I think there are plenty of other cases where users would be unpleasantly surprised by finding that order matters.
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