Does XML care about the order of elements?

Question

XML confuses me sometimes, but I\'m trying to get this figured out. What the vendor is telling me doesn\'t make sense but again, XML and I don\'t get along :)

I have

Answer 1

Accessing XML by DOM preserves the order of nodes the way they are in your XML document. Look here:

http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_nodes_nodelist.asp

there you find:

A node list object represents a list of nodes, in the same order as in the XML.

If your web service is relying on the order is a different question - it may or may not, that depends on the web service implementation.