Yes. At the moment, the XML declaration has a required order in which
the bits must appear. However, the namespace declaration, which looks
(on the face of it) remarkably similar, does not. Yes, I find this
irritating. My vote was for the namespace declarations to be strictly
ordered for consistency with the XML declaration, but I lost. My
opinion is that
1. Because the XML spec BNF doesn't have the &-connector, it's hard and
inelegant to specify required-but-unordered; so I didn't bother for
the XML declaration, and neither Michael nor anyone else caught me
on this.
2. My WG colleagues *did* catch this in the namespace declaration, and
were more irritated by the strict ordering than by the inconsistency;
this leads to the current situation.
-Tim