[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)
From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@s...> >Now if only we knew quite how it happened that way in SGML - might help to >evaluate whether the blushing is worth it! (See my previous post) An example of the same issue came up in XML Schemas' design, and was resolved differently. The example was whether to have attribute declations before or after or either or both of content declarations. The issue for this and for attributes is whether, if something is not significant, order should be fixed or free. There is an argument (entirely spurious IMHO) that (supposedly based on "information theoretic principles") that you want to reduce randomness so that you can, for example, increase various kinds of compressability or slottedness which might be good for data transmission and implementation; with this view, fixing some arbitrary order is good. 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. And, in passing, I note that C14n has required sorted attributes to help comparisons, so if semi-c14n of data become usual we can expect less preservation of the order of attributes in the future (for vanilla-infoset -based processors.) (Also, I am aware we are to some extent talking some of us about significance and some of us about preservation, which are not the same.) Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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