RE: attribute order

Current releases of Saxon will output attributes in the order they are
processed in the stylesheet, unless you attempt to output two attributes
with the same name. But attributes copied from the source document can be
reordered by the XML parser (and sometimes are).

But you shouldn't rely on this behavior for anything except the cosmetic
appearance of the output. Any software that depends on attribute order in an
XML document is plain wrong.

(There is universal consensus that in XML, element order is important but
attribute order isn't. There is nothing explicit in the XML specification
that says this, but it's made clear in the definition of the InfoSet.)

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Andy Joslin
> Sent: 22 February 2002 10:04
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE:  attribute order
>
>
> Hi Peter
>
> I've just tried rearranging the attributes and the processor
> (in my case,
> Xalan/Xerces) does seem to respect the order..
>
> e.g.
>
> <xsl:attribute name="width">580</xsl:attribute>
> <xsl:attribute name="cellpadding">0</xsl:attribute>
> <xsl:attribute name="cellspacing">0</xsl:attribute>
> <xsl:attribute name="border">0</xsl:attribute>
>
> becomes...
>
> <table width="580" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0">
>
>
> I can't speak for other processors, but this works for me. I
> don't know what
> setup Meltem is using, but it would be interesting to see if
> this behaviour
> is consistent across implementations.
>
>
> cheers
>
>
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Davis [mailto:pdavis152@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 21 February 2002 19:34
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re:  attribute order
>
>
>
> It was my experience that processors that change the order tend to
> alphabetize the attributes, or, if the processor happens to store the
> attributes in a hash-map of some kind, seemingly random
> order.  Have you
> tried if rearranging the attribute-set has the same effect in
> the output?
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
>


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