If order really is significant (for some processing), then use elements rather
than attributes.
To quote Joe English's "Not the comp.text.sgml Frequently Asked Questions List":
Q. I'm designing my first DTD. Should I use elements or
attributes to store data?
A. Of course. What else would you use?
Well, he could have suggested processing instructions ;)
These days, there isn't really much you can do with attributes that you can't
do as well with elements, given Relax NG and Schematron.
kind regards
Peter Ring
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmleditor-support-bounces at xmlmind.com
> [mailto:xmleditor-support-bounces at xmlmind.com]On Behalf Of
> Paul Moloney
> Sent: 31. januar 2007 11:43
> To: Keith Fahlgren; xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com
> Subject: Re: [XXE] Preventing Attributes Being Reordered?
>
>
> >> Internally attributes are stored in (small and efficient)
> hash table.
> >> Therefore, once an XML file has been loaded in XMLmind XML
> Editor, the
> >> ordering information of attributes is totally lost.
>
> > Additionally, this is in line with the XML spec:
> >
> > Note that the order of attribute specifications in a start-tag or
> > empty-element tag is not significant.
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags
>
> Hi Keith/Hussein,
>
> Thanks; it doesn't bother me, but I've used the tool to edit
> non-DocBook XML
> files by developers who didn't like the fact elements were
> reordered as (a)
> they often had elements with a large number of attributes
> including a "name"
> attribute, which they usually had as the first one to make
> visually scanning
> for particular elements easy, and (b) when checking the files
> into revision
> control, it's hard to spot the exact changes made to the file.
>
> Cheers,
>
