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Posted to j-users@xerces.apache.org by "Rob S." <rs...@home.com> on 2002/01/29 19:10:02 UTC
RE: why does xerces add attributes in alphabetical order of
attri bute name
>Say the important elements of your xml are identified by a name which is
>identifies them to your editors. The other attributes are less important.
The XML spec's design goal #6 says that they should be
human-readable. Considering they are readable as-is, and enforcing
ordering would require more work, why do it? In your example, yes, but if
there were 20 or 30 <elem> elements, you would do CTRL-F "wid" and keep
hitting ALT-F until you found the one you wanted. Adding more rules
complicates things for what I see as a payoff only a small percentage of
the time.
IMHO, the original person that brought this up probably wanted to use
ordering of attributes for structure when that's not what I believe the
purpose of attributes is.
- r
>It's a lot easier to spot the widget in
>
><doc>
> <elem name="widget" code="XYZ-1234" country="US" type="A">
> blah blah
> blah blah
> blah blah
> </elem>
> <elem name="fribber" code="XYZ-1235" country="Australia" type="A">
> blah blah
> blah blah
> blah blah
> </elem>
> <elem name="skiff" code="XYW-1234" type="B">
> blah blah
> blah blah
> blah blah
> </elem>
> etc
>
>than in
>
>
> <elem code="XYZ-1234" country="US" name="widget" type="A">
> blah blah
> blah blah
> blah blah
> </elem>
> <elem code="XYZ-1235" country="Australia" name="fribber" type="B">
> blah blah
> blah blah
> blah blah
> </elem>
> <elem code="XYW-1234" name="skiff" type="A">
> blah blah
> blah blah
> blah blah
> </elem>
> etc
>
>
>
>
>
> "Rob
> S."
>
> <rslifka@home.co To:
> xerces-j-user@xml.apache.org
> m> cc:
>
> Subject: RE: why does
> xerces add attributes in alphabetical order of attri
> 01/29/2002 12:34 bute
> name
> PM
>
> Please
> respond
>
> to
> xerces-j-user
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >I know that this is not the right list to address the issue, but I just
> >want to point out that XML was invented with human readability in mind --
> >so it seems perfectly reasonable to want to make an XML document humanly
> >readable (ie. by ordering attributes in some meaningful order). I guess it
>
> >was an oversight in the XML spec to specify attributes unordered.
>
>I would guess from the designer's perspective, the answer is "why?" What
>benefits are there to ordering attributes? Elements are not ordered to
>preserve readability, they are ordered to preserve structure. If the
>readability of your document is severely influenced by attribute ordering,
>I'd guess that you have too many attributes in an element.
>
>- r
>
>
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