another thought on "is element order significant" vs DTDs in WebDAV

Hi,

here are a few reasons why I think WebDAV should say that element ordering
is irrelevant:

1) There are already existing well-deployed servers (in this case IIS) that
get the ordering wrong (here: propstat content), thus clients can't rely on
ordering anyway for all practical purposes,

2) Requiring a specific ordering will make protocol extensions extremely
hard. For instance, take two independant extensions "A" and "B" that extend
RFC2518 and add new elements to the same container element. If at a later
point a new protocol revision  tries to integrate both extensions, it will
be hard to come up with a simple DTD that consolidates both changes.

Julian

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Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2003 09:04:05 UTC