sequence of XML elements

[Jonas Hei]

Can someone please clarify the in which XML standard (and various parsers)
handle sequence of elements in XML?

1. Are the following two documents same (syntactically and sematically)?
a.
<Data>
<InitialQualifi er>xyz</InitialQualifie r>
<Value>678</Value>
<Value>524</Value>
</Data>
b.
<Data>
<InitialQualifi er>xyz</InitialQualifie r>
<Value>524</Value>
<Value>678</Value>
</Data>


2. Do parsers (JDOM, MSXML, etc, etc) guarantee that the sequence of
elements at a given level in hierarchy (like the <Value> elements in the
above example) will be preserved when the file is loaded,
processed(edite d) and saved back?


3. Any comments on the following:
<Data>
<Year>2001</Year>
<Month>06</Month> <--implies Jun-2001-->
<Month>05</Month> <--implies May-2002-->
<Month>07</Month> <--implies Jul-2003-->
</Data>

[Martin Honnen]

Re: sequence of XML elements



Jonas Hei wrote:

[color=blue]
> 1. Are the following two documents same (syntactically and sematically)?
> a.
> <Data>
> <InitialQualifi er>xyz</InitialQualifie r>
> <Value>678</Value>
> <Value>524</Value>
> </Data>
> b.
> <Data>
> <InitialQualifi er>xyz</InitialQualifie r>
> <Value>524</Value>
> <Value>678</Value>
> </Data>[/color]

No, the documents are not the same, the order of elements matters, see
for instance the XML information set specification

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#infoitem.element

[color=blue]
> 2. Do parsers (JDOM, MSXML, etc, etc) guarantee that the sequence of
> elements at a given level in hierarchy (like the <Value> elements in
> the above example) will be preserved when the file is loaded,
> processed(edite d) and saved back?[/color]

In the DOM (document object model) the order of child nodes matters and
is preserved when saving back (serializing the DOM tree).



--

Martin Honnen

http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/