In what order should the elements in children() be returned?  I assumed it would be the top-down order in which they appear in the source (or added to the DOM).  Then children() would just do a breadth first search and return the elements in that order.

I'm finding, however, that Firefox and Chrome actually return in different orders.  Firefox seems to follow the order as described.  Chrome seems to do it in reverse.

Is there any guarantee on the ordering at least at the browser level?  What would be the best way for me to enforce a consistent ordering?  Ultimately, I'd like to serialize certain DOM attributes and do pair-wise comparisons across them, but the inconsistent ordering is throwing me off.

Thanks,

Kevin