Re: process order (still...)

[Mike Brown <mike at skew dot org>]

I wrote:
> > But... why? What is the point of leaving attribute order
> > up to the parser? 

David Carlisle wrote: 
> Because attributes have no inherent order.

I'm asking why do they have no inherent order. "Because the implementation
might be some wacky hash table" is a circular argument. But you did almost
satisfy my curiosity with this point:

> consider attribute defaulting from a DTD. If the DTD supplies an
> attribute a parser will add it, but nothing in the XML spec says whether
> the attribute should be first or last or in alphabeic order
> [...] when that is exposed as the input
> tree to XSL you will see different results on different systems.

It still seems a bit arbitrary that certain types of nodes simply don't
have an inherent order. If order can be imposed on elements, text,
comments and processing-instructions...

> Surely you don't expect me to read the spec! I just learn XSL by
> answering questions on this list, then waiting for people to correct me.

Touché!

> (In that case I think `processed in document order' has to mean
> `processed in any order at all, but results added to output tree in
> document order, otherwise something is wrong with the world)

Agreed. See my reply to Michael Kay for more on this.

   - Mike
___________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer, Webb Interactive Services
XML/XSL stuff: http://www.skew.org/    http://www.webb.net/


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