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Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
• From: "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@o...>
• Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 14:43:24 -0400
• References: <r01050400-1026-97475144A4DD11D78EFB0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> I don't expect you to get excited about attribute order.  I do, however,
> find it perverse that you expect me not to get excited about the fact
> that you prefer to throw away information which I frequently find useful
> in editing, and which is present in the document anyway.
>

Granted editors have special requirements, and I don't hear many folks
suggesting that SAX is an appropriate API on which to write an XML editor.
But I am not writting editors, I am encoding application specific
information in XML documents. A bunch of people have gotten together and
decided that such application specific information _ought not_ be encoded on
the basis of attribute order (i.e. SAX doesn't tell the application about
this). Why is this perverse?

The whole reason that I am interested in using an API is that this can help
me extract the information in the document that I am interested in. Why
should I be interested in whether an element is encoded as:

<foo bar="1"></foo>
vs.
<foo bar='1'
></foo>
vs.
<foo bar="1" />
vs ....
(and on and on)

when I just want to represent an element "foo" with an attribute "bar"
having a value "1".

Call this 'abstraction' but that's the essense of XML -- I'd dare say that
XML wouldn't have become so popular if I'd _needed_ to worry about such
details.

Jonathan

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