RE: last attribute ?

["John E. Simpson" <simpson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 03:03 PM 09/26/2000 -0400, Brian Young wrote:
> Why would the attributes not be processed in document order?

Short answer is: Because the XPath/XSLT specs explicitly *say* that the 
order in which attributes are retained in the processor's internal tree 
cannot be counted on.

The longer answer is that attributes (as opposed to elements) do not 
function as "structured content." Basically, you (or whoever's designed the 
XML vocabulary you're using) have opted to put certain information into 
attributes, for one reason or another, but you'd like them under some cases 
to function like elements. That's not possible, to my knowledge.

I've never written an XSLT processor, but I imagine that internally, 
attribute name/value pairs are kept in some kind of indexed structure, e.g. 
alphabetically by attribute name, to speed access to them when/if needed. 
To the extent that this is true, you *might* be able to use a particular 
processor to spit them out in the same order they came in by ordering the 
attributes in each element instance in the same order as the processor will 
store them, e.g.
   <elem
      attrib_a="something"
      attrib_b="something_b" [...etc...]
      attrib_z="something_z"/>
I think I tested Saxon once, months ago, to see how it handled this 
sitation and (at least at that time, with that document, etc.) it did 
indeed seem to be ordering attributes alphabetically. So no matter what 
order attrib_a, _b, etc. appeared in in the source document, they always 
seemed to come out of the processor in alphabetical order.

But again, the processor might under certain circumstances re-order them 
some other way, or a new version of the processor might use some other 
indexing scheme, or you yourself might later opt to use a different 
processor, e.g. for cross-platform testing if nothing else. Under any of 
those conditions, you're back to Square One.

> If they are not, how can this be forced?

It can't, to my knowledge.


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