On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Yitzchak Gale <gale@sefer.org> wrote:

After upgrading to xml-enumerator 0.2.1 and xml-types 0.2,
I can no longer control the order of attributes in rendered XML.

The XML specification specifically allows this - you can
change the order of attributes with affecting the semantics
of the document. I need the attributes to be in a sane order
for reading by humans so that the XML will pass my
customer's acceptance testing.

Earlier versions of xml-types supported this, but 0.2 introduced
an API change which forces attribute sets to be expressed as
a Data.Map.

Why not just use association lists? That seems like a perfect
fit. Or just go back to the old API.

Thanks,
Yitz

For the record, I would like to see this change too. I'm less concerned about attribute ordering (just because I don't think any human ever reads my XML output... at least I hope for their sake they aren't), but it's a little more difficult to code against the current API than if we used an assoc list. I'm also not certain that we're gaining any performance by using Map, since there are rarely any significant numbers of attributes used that the difference between O(n) lookups for assoc lists and O(log n) for Maps will make a significant difference.

Just my 2 cents.

Michael