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RE: Should we care about elements order ?

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 15:33:49 -0500

Yes.  That is why recordset walking occupies a lot 
of ASP scripting.  Occasionally, using 
some logic to concatenate morphs and microparsing 
has its applications.

Anyone who wants to understand or illustrate 
the differences, try to write an XML editor 
that uses a relational database to populate a
treeview based on a related table that contains 
the type definition information.  After this, 
the DOM is seen as a really really nice thing 
to have.  It is very hard to do this with 
recordsets precisely because the order isn't 
known, so one punts to keeping a morphology 
as a field to keep up with current position. 
Madness follows quickly usually as one tries 
to walk out the pseudo-tree.

There were some papers published on this 
in the auto industry in the early nineties. 
I can't remember the fellow's name but he 
advocated precisely such a system in which 
one stored strucuture names such as chapter, 
section, etc in the record.  It had a big 
following at TechDoc Winter 92.  As I recall, 
Goldfarb counterpublished information showing 
precisely how brittle the system would be.  
I tried it myself using namespaces and 
the definition table trick.  Madness but 
an excellent experiment mainly because, 
I won't do that again. :-)

Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@i...
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]

At 05:20 PM 20/10/00 +0200, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>1) Should we always pay attention to the relative order of the elements
>within XML documents ?

No.  Tons of conventional business data is oblivious to the order of
its fields, and one of the nice things about an RDBMS is that I can
arrange for the rows of the table and the colums of a row to be in
any order I like.

XML is differentiated in that it is *possible* (not necessary) to deal 
with order-significant data.  The most obvious examples where this is 
useful are in the publishing space, but there are others.  In my opinion, 
this is the one aspect of XML that is the hardest to deal with when
trying to apply traditional relational technology. -Tim

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