Canonical Form of XML Document

Canonical XML Version 1.0, W3C Recommendation 15 March 2001, http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n

The goal of CF is to describe criteria and algorithm how to define equivalence on XML documents that are "logically" the same and expose just differences in physical form (entities, attribute order, char encoding)

Canonication "wipes-out" differences that are not significant for applications.

Canonication in inevitable in some important applications , e.g. electronic signature of XML data (when calculating digest).