Attribute order is explicitly Not Meaningful in XML, so XML processing code can present attributes in whatever order is most efficient for it. Xerces uses alphabetical because, when I rattled off that code many years ago, part of my concern was minimal storage space (so I didn't want to use a separate hashtable) and the other part was reasonably fast access (so I wanted something I could search reasonably rapidly).
There's no strong reason for alphabetical order -- but the two points *are* stong reasons for not promising any paticular order, and in particular not promising that the original order in the source document will be retained. If you concern is being able to compare files, there are good XML-specific diff tools available; use one of those rather than a text-based diff. Or, as noted, canonicalize before diffing the text files. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more. "The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
