title: In XML, is order important?
body: <p>Is the order that elements of a common parent appear in XML a meaningful piece of data captured by the XML document, or is order not specified as being meaningful? For example, consider the two XML documents:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;people&gt;
   &lt;person name="sam"/&gt;
   &lt;person name="juni"/&gt;
  &lt;/people&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;people&gt;
   &lt;person name="juni"/&gt;
   &lt;person name="sam"/&gt;
  &lt;/people&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Are these documents considered to represent <strong>identical</strong> data, or is the difference in order captured?</p>