Hi Jenda

I don't know whether it's against the rules of XML (I seriously doubt it!)

I was speaking out of turn. I'm not sure either. It is easy to prove by defining it in either a document declaration or a xml schema. If that is possible, it is legal.

but I've met way too many cases when the other party insisted that the tags are in a specific order so I would be very wary of changing the order.

An artificial limitation with things like XPath. But I can see how it happens, too.

If there are hundreds of thousands of them i do think it's safe to assume the individual records are rather small.

My experience is different :-) But yes if I can assume the records are smallish, your advice is better in many ways (a lot more code is already written for you). I should have mentioned that.

trwww