- From: Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:33:37 +0100
- To: COLLARD Jean-Francois <jean-francois.collard@swift.com>
- CC: xmlschema-dev@w3.org
Hi Jean-Francois, > Using a xml schema, how is it possible to impose the order of the > attributes on a element in a xml instance? eg : on the element > 'elem1' I want the attributes to appear in the order : first 'att1' > then 'att2' and finally 'att3'. The XML Rec says that the order in which attributes appear in a start tag is insignificant. XML parsers are free to report the order of attributes in any way that they like -- for example, they might report them in alphabetical order if that makes the parser more efficient. All the schema languages I know of, including XML Schema, work based on the information that they can get from an XML parser. Since that set of information doesn't include information about how the attributes were originally ordered, no schema language gives you the ability to check the order in which the attributes were specified. So if this is really an important constraint in your documents, you need to write a validator (in Perl or some other text-processing language) that views the documents as streams of characters rather than with the logical view that XML parsers provide. Most probably, though, you should be using elements instead of attributes if the order in which the information appears actually matters. Cheers, Jeni --- Jeni Tennison http://www.jenitennison.com/
Received on Thursday, 17 July 2003 06:33:42 UTC