[topicmapmail] Any semantic order to repeatable "or" groups of constructs in XTM?

[Alexander Johannesen]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> In the OKS we've simply decided that we are not preserving lexical
> information such as order of topics/associations and so on, and
> that's that. The thinking behind this has been that topic maps should be 
> maintained via a user interface rather than in an XML document.

Working mostly with XSLT (which is event-based, not order-based), I
had no choice in the matter, but my opinion is that it *should* be order- 
free. The XTM syntax is so verbose and the number of items in it often so 
many that those factors alone make XTM a nightmare to manually
edit, and I would say it even promotes people to get a proper tool to
maintain them instead. If you need order, properties are your friend as you 
then work on data you *know* instead of the guesswork of the XTM.
As the spec iteself doesn't require order, to maintain interchangability
you shouldn't even think in those terms.


Alexander
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