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On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 22:49:26 -0400, Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com> wrote: | In general hashmaps do not preserve insertion order, so it may be | that this was a rationale for discarding the order of attributes. Actually, the order of attributes was _never_ a concern. SAX was invented/developed on this mailing list, back in 1997-98. The early discussions were aimed at finding common ground between the Aelfred and Lark parsers, both of which were implemented in Java. One of the features decided upon quite early, in the overall context of a "callback" or "push parser" framework, was that the attributes in a start-tag would be presented as a collection to the app layer in the start_element() notification, rather than individually. A dictionary style interface would then allow the app to interrogate the attributes it needed to know about, in an order that made logical sense at the app level. See for example: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199712/msg00232.html Going further back, one would have to know that the first cuts at XML APIs were based - for reasons that may not be obvious today - on prior experience with SGML APIs. And here, the canonical exemplar was the implementation of an adjunct of ISO 8879 (thr SGML standard) called ESIS ("Element Structure Information Set") in James Clark's sgmls and nsgmls parsers. http://www.jclark.com/sp/sgmlsout.htm The "official" spec for ESIS http://xml.coverpages.org/WG8-n931a.html did not consider attribute order significant, and so it has been - or rather, not been - ever since.
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