RE: ORA-DM-ORDERTOTAL

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Buxton [mailto:stephen.buxton@oracle.com] 
Sent: 25 June 2003 06:07
To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
Subject: ORA-DM-ORDERTOTAL




Data Model, Section 3.2 Document order 
The first paragraph says that a document order is total. 
The last two paragraphs broaden the discussion to include order between
nodes in different documents, or not in a document at all. 
Is it intended that the ordering in the latter two paragraphs is total? Or
could a conforming implementation simply say, "I choose not to define an
ordering between nodes in different documents, or between nodes not in any
document. My ordering of these things is the trivial ordering, the one which
such things simply have no ordering."? 


Put another way, is there anything that breaks if an implementation is not
able to place a collection of free-standing nodes into a stable order? 

Yes, the XSLT expression document(//a/@href) ceases to produce repeatable
results.

Michael Kay