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Bryce K. Nielsen wrote: > I don't mean to keep bringing this up, but a lot of posts I read here talk > about elements being ordered, so I'm often confused since I've always > thought one of the powers of XML was the ability to allow unordered > elements? When you invent an XML language, you can write rules that say the elements have to be in a particular order, or you can write rules saying they can come in any order. Whatever schema language you're using, the unordered case tends to be a little more work to declare properly, but it usually can be done. Whether or not you're validating, all the runtime APIs to XML allow the application to find out what order the elements were in the XML document, and this information is part of the XML Information Set. So in general it's correct to say that elements *are* ordered and the order *can be* significant. However, you may choose neither to enforce any particular orderat validation nor use this information at runtime. -Tim
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