relative order of attributes

David Carlisle wrote:
> Attributes are explictly unordered beasts

I went looking for the explicit quote and found "The relative order of
attribute nodes is implementation-dependent" in the XPath spec at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#data-model

I don't disagree with it, but it seems to be less than intuitive, given
that section 2.4 implies that an attribute axis is a forward axis and thus
contains nodes in document order.


My interpretation is:

1. the attribute axis contains attribute nodes relative to the current
node, if it is an element

2. the attribute axis is a forward axis, so its nodes are in document
order

3. attribute nodes do not have a relative order in the data model


So which is it? Ordered or not?

In either case I don't see how this could return anything other than 
document-ordered attributes, because xsl:for-each by default processes
nodes in document order:

<xsl:for-each select="@*">
  <xsl:value-of select="concat(name(.),'=',.)"/>
</xsl:for-each>  

-Mike