Re: creation order vs. document order

Bas de Bakker wrote:
>> I don't think that answers my question. This says something about
>> the order of the nodes but nothing about their order in document 
>> order: it is still quite possible that Value2 precedes Value1 in 
>> document order. It all depends on where in the universe of all
>> created fragment newly created nodes are placed when they are
>> created.
> 
> Section 3.2 of the data model says:
> 
> The relative order of free-standing nodes (elements, attributes, and 
> other nodes created outside the context of a particular document) is 
> also implementation-dependent but stable.
> 
> That seems to answer your question.

Yes, it does. So thank you, Bas, Torsten and Michael for your answers.

However, now that I read this section again, I'm slightly confused. Is 
the relative order between element nodes inside a fragment really 
implementation-dependent? So the semantics of

   (<x><y id="1"/><y id="2"/></x>)/y

could be either

   <y id="1"/><y id="2"/>   or    <y id="2"/><y id="1"/>   ?

Or should I read "document" in the above Section 3.2 quote as "fragment"?

Is it also correct that the ordering can "mix" nodes of different 
documents? So a node of document d1 can be between two nodes of document d2?

Finally I'm also a bit confused by the first sentence that says that the 
document order is defined on all the nodes in a document. Does that mean 
that it is not defined on nodes outside documents? What then is the name 
of the ordering over *all* the nodes? I thought *that* what was called 
the document order.

-- Jan Hidders

PS. I'm getting often two versions of each reply in my mailbox, one 
directed to the mailing list and one directed to my personal e-mail 
address. Is this intentional, or is the mailing list badly configured?

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 13:01:46 UTC