We're using XXE quite a bit and are generally very pleased with it, especially for DocBook documents.
We are also using it for our own DTDs, some of which use many more attributes than sub-elements (typical for "data" XML as opposed to "document" XML). Especially for these private DTDs, the fact that XXE places the attributes of an element in an arbitrary order is a bit of a bother, since it creates spurious differences in the CVS version tracking repository (order of attributes is meaningless for XML, so the semantic content of the files is unaffected, but the changes show up as differences for CVS or even wdiff, a word-based, rather than line-based, diff program). It would really be nice if the next XXE release would use one of the following arbitrary orders for attributes: 1. "Preserved" order; i.e. same as the input file, unless attributes are added or deleted. 2. "DTD" order; i.e. order of the attributes as specified in <!ATTRLIST> in DTD. 3. Alphabetic order. 4. "Consistent" order (arbitrary, but identical for any element with the same set of attributes - independent of their values). Our preference would be for 1, then 2, 3, or 4. I realize that the XML parser may make it difficult to implement 1, but 3 would seem to be possible in any case (although it might impose a performance penalty and perhaps should be a user configuration option). Even 4 would be better for us than the current situation, where a single file tends to be consistent, but if data is cut/pasted between files, spurious diffs occur. Thanks for your consideration of this feature request. @alex -- mailto:dupuy at sysd.com
