Rationale

This section lists some design decisions that have been made during the development of the library.

The output streams do not accept a grammar during construction for validation

• validation can only occur once the document is complete
• failed validation usually throws an exception
• the xml::xofstream uses RAII to flush the document to file in its destructor
• a destructor must not throw
• anyway it's simple enough to re-open the output stream with an input stream for validation afterwards

Document type definitions (DTD) cannot be specified with an external grammar

• see this thread for details

In an output stream the attributes of an element are sorted alphabetically

• there is no control over the order of attributes in Apache Xerces, see this thread for a (short) explanation