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> My view is that fixing any order where none is required is > gratuitous, taxing and goes against the > spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-medicine-go-down principle; with this view, > allowing arbitrary order is good because it does not require generators to > (have to worry about code to) sort the attributes in ways redundant for > naming purposes. Right, but if you view attributes at "attributes of a type", and content as "attributes of a type" (syntactic sugar), we get into a funky world where one asks why you can't specify the ordering of attributes as you can content. This is kind of where the SML folk were coming from. FWIW. I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have a schema language that had provision for attribute ordering validation, but I agree that this will almost always be *way* overkill. I'm actually amazed that SGML is as *usable* as it is (really!)... when you think of all the alternatives to unordered attributes, none is anywhere nearly as appealing.
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