XML question
So, to get the basics out of the way, I hate XML. I'm forced to deal with it for a hack I'm fiddling with right now, though. And having poked this with a stick for the last week, I've finally found the problem: I am sending data formatted as and the client wants , i.e. the order of the contained elements turns out to be important. Now, as far as I can tell, the contained elements are not order-dependant; they're essentially attributes of the container (foo) which can logically interact with each other unambiguously regardless of order (one's a default setting, one's a current setting, and one's a timeout value). While I'm happy to cast asparagus on Microsoft for this (for theirs is the client) I'm curious as to whether this is common behaviour or just short-sighted programming?