Response to XML Schema LC-200: Unordered children

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The original message was received at Wed, 20 Sep 2000 14:10:51 -0700 (PDT)
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Dear XML Query members,

The W3C XML Schema Working Group has spent the last several months 
working through the comments received from the public on the last-call 
draft of the XML Schema specification.  We thank you for the comments 
you made on our specification during our last-call comment period, and 
want to make sure you know that all comments received during the 
last-call comment period have been recorded in our last-call issues 
list (http://www.w3.org/2000/05/12-xmlschema-lcissues). 

Among other issues, you raised the point registered as issue LC-200:

> 2.3 Treatment of collections
> 
> In processing a query, sometimes the order of children in an element 
> is relevant and sometimes it is not. In the case where order is not
> relevant, additional optimizations may be performed. It would be 
> helpful if schema could provide some way to indicate whether the 
> order of the children is significant. For instance, this might be 
> done by giving a type an `ordered' property. Thus, just as the 
> content of a non-empty element is always either mixed or 
> elementOnly, it also might be either ordered or unordered. 


After discussion of various alternatives, the Schema WG decided that
a key aspect of asserting the insignificance of child order was that 
this would not affect schema validation of an instance.  Hence a 
natural place to specify this would be as an <annotation> of a type 
definition, since a schema annotation is required to have no impact 
on validation.  We have not specified the details of such an 
annotation, but would welcome future cooperation with the Query WG 
in doing so.

It would be helpful to us to know whether you are satisfied with the 
decision taken by the XML Schema WG on this issue, or wish your 
dissent from the WG's decision to be recorded for consideration by 
the Director of the W3C. 

  David