Hi John,
On 9/20/2012 2:16 PM, John P. McCaskey wrote:
Could you characterize where in your algorithms you find the order of
nodes along the attribute axis important or useful?
An example right now is a stylesheet that renders TEI documents in a
browser. The attributes of an element are listed in two places,
displayed differently. I'd prefer they get displayed in the same order
in both places.
You can always, if you prefer, sort them into the order you wish them to
be displayed in. This is trivial to do if ordering them alphabetically
by name is acceptable, less so (but still doable) if you want some other
kind of canonical order.
And since I know that encoders in this community, by habit and tool,
enter attributes in a certain order, I'd like the displayed order to be
document order.
By "document order" I take it you mean the order in which they happen to
be represented in the XML (syntax) instance being parsed.
As this thread has stated (and it seems to be the only thing agreed on
here), the document order given to and in XSLT processing has no
necessary relation to the order of appearance of attributes in their
tags in the instance. Your parser might happen to build documents that
look this way, but another might not.
This means that XSLT can't actually render an XML document with "tag
fidelity", but this is already true in other ways. For example, you
can't know where CDATA marked sections may have been used in your source
XML instance.
You can ameliorate this, if it's a problem, by supplementing your XSLT
with another pre-process (not XSLT) that amends the document coming in
to give the necessary information in some way that the subsequent
process can then read. But mostly people don't find the requirement for
perfect tag fidelity to be that pressing.
Right now, I'm just guessing that the processor will use document order,
and so far I've been right. Fortunately, if it doesn't, nothing
catastrophic happens. So I'm not bothering with any hoop jumping on this
one.
This is probably wise. I'm sure that rendering TEI you have more
interesting things to worry about. :-)
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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