All that having been said, the OP is looking to address a common problem among makers of XML authoring tools–the need to respect the user’s choice of attribute order and other such lexical details. It’s not really useful to repeat over and over that the XML spec states that attribute order is not considered significant in determining the conformance of a parser. And it’s very unfair to state that the OP is somehow fudging the grand name of “XML”. Just as a fun exercise in monkey-wrench throwing, if you read carefully enough, there’s the little-known fact that XML 1.0 doesn’t require parsers to report child elements in any particular order, either.

Uche Ogbuji, here.