Just one idea for your consideration...

For my project I needed some way to keep and manage arbitrary order of objects in a hash-element, which is reflected
in the order as the objects appear in the XML. I did a very straightforward hack to the code, which you won't like,
but I enclose it for illustration. It takes care of the order when reading/writing hashes of object nodes, in case the
objects have attribute accessor called "_xml_position"  (being a plain integer) defined. Maybe the capability
and the name of the attribute should be rather configurable?

Date: 2010-06-10 18:03
Sender: Pavel Vondricka

Right. But I also need to be able to change the order
manually at any time.

Date: 2010-05-23 19:34
Sender: Olaf Klischat

...also, hashes seem to be insertion-ordered in 1.9, so people
could just wait for 1.9 support :-P

Date: 2010-05-23 19:27
Sender: Olaf Klischat

I would probably prefer to allow the user to specify the class
of the hash attribute to be created (defaulting to Hash), so
the user can supply a hash class there that remembers the insertion
order of its elements (and reproduces it when #each_pair is called
on it).

Date: 2010-05-23 12:33
Sender: Pavel Vondricka

Sorry, it did not upload the attachment...