RE: process order (still...)

[Kevin Williams <Kevin dot Williams at ultraprise dot com>]

My $0.02:

Attributes have no inherent order because there is no semantic meaning to
their order. In other words, say I have the following element:

<dog color="brown" name="Fido"/>

There's no significance to the fact that the color comes before the name.
Something like:

<dog name="Fido" color="brown">

conveys exactly the same information. This is why I am a (somewhat
heretical, I fear) advocate of using attributes to represent information
when using XML for data - just like in a relational database, it doesn't
really matter whether piece of information (column) A comes before or after
piece of information (column) B. The only thing that's meaningful about an
attribute is the element to which it's attached, not the order in which it
appears.

- Kevin

Kevin Williams
XML Architect
Ultraprise Corporation
kwilliams@ultraprise.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Brown [mailto:mike@skew.org]
> Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2000 1:39 PM
> To: xsl-list@mulberrytech.com
> Subject: Re: process order (still...)
> 
> I'm asking why do they have no inherent order. "Because the 
> implementation
> might be some wacky hash table" is a circular argument. 


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