[Python-ideas] Let's be more orderly!

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Wed, May 15, 2013, at 16:36, Don Spaulding wrote:
> Hmm, when I ran across this particular problem, I recall seeing somewhere
> that the preservation of element order in the spec is undefined.  And
> indeed it appears that while attributes are called explicitly as not
> having
> significant order, the spec doesn't actually weigh in on element order
> one
> way or another.  However, regardless of what's in the spec, it would seem
> that everyone just assumes element order to be significant anyway, so it
> doesn't really matter.

Just remember, HTML is an XML dialect. If assumption leads to the
conclusion that paragraphs could be randomly shuffled around on a page,
it's probably wrong.

Now, _specific_ XML specs (i.e. the one that specifically defines
"request" for the web service you were using) _can_ be defined in a way
that doesn't care about order, and many do, but it's not something about
XML itself.