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>
<InitialQualifier>xyz</InitialQualifier>
<Value>678</Value>
<Value>524</Value>
</Data>
b.
<Data>
<InitialQualifier>xyz</InitialQualifier>
<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(edited) 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]

Jonas Hei wrote:

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

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

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(edited) and saved back?

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