RE: [DM]Relative order of Attribute Nodes

I agree with you.. From XML's point of view it
certainly makes sense (as you have explained).

But I still do have a feeling(from XSLT point of view,
and not XML), that making output of @*[n] "consistent
across XSLT implementations" would be useful for some
classes of problems.. i.e. @*[1] should return the 1st
attribute, @*[2] the 2nd one and so on..

Is it worth debating about this feature, and if found
useful be made part of the "XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0
Data Model"..  

Regards,
Mukul

--- Michael Kay <mhk@mhk.me.uk> wrote:

> 
> > Thanks for the answer. I am now curious, why XML
> > attributes have this characteristic..
> 
> That's a historical question: you might get a better
> answer from the SGML
> folks on xml-dev. There is, I think, a very strong
> consensus in the XML
> world that elements are ordered but attributes are
> not - though I don't
> think there is anything in the XML spec itself that
> says so. However, you
> will find this consensus reflected in most
> processing models and APIs for
> XML. It derives, I think, from the traditional use
> of elements to represent
> the visible text in a document and attributes to
> represent its typographical
> properties.
> 
> Michael Kay


		
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Received on Thursday, 4 November 2004 14:18:40 UTC