Pierre THIERRY wrote:
I'm pretty sure XML is order-dependent. Some languages whose syntax is based on XML could have a semantic that is independant of the order of the tags in the document, like RDF/XML, but different ordering of the tags produce different XML documents and different XML infosets...
I'm sorry to disagree but each XML element can be order-dependent or not according to the XML schema used. In the XML schemas you can specify the sub-elements of a given element must appear on a given order or you can specify sub-elements can appear in any order and in any amount. Furthermore, you can specify if an element may contain new sub-elements (open content model) or only those sub-elements specified in the schema (closed content model). However, boost::serialization doesn't care about XML schemas and the current serialization xml archive seems to use a SAX-style parsing to process the XML document so it must be order-dependent. If the XML were parsed via a DOM then elements and attributes could be requested in any order but as Robert Ramey said, you would need to load the whole XML in memory which is overkill for many applications. Hopefully somebody will have the time to build a DOM-parsing XML archive and then developers can select SAX or DOM parsing depending on the application. Just my 2 cents, -delfin