Q:

How to ask/phrase questions concerning the attributes of a particular language

A while back I posted a question asking which portions of an xml node are read first when using C#. My reasoning behind this was that for my particular use case it didn't really matter whether I put my intended value in the name, attribute, or innertext, i just needed which ever was read first (i.e. fastest) because i would be doing thousands of read/comparisons.
As anyone who has used StackOverflow for a while could probably guess, the question was quickly flagged as not being specific, downvoted, and then deleted. While that was going on, there was the normal plethora of "what did your benchmarks and tests show?" questions.
So my question is how do I ask these foresight based questions? Sure I don't have a "problem" per se because I thought of my potential issues ahead of time and am trying to tailor my solution around them. 
This is a very similar problem to all the closed "best-practice" questions that you see when trying to plan out a project. Ask a question before you start and you get your hand slapped and your question thrown out, but if you arbitrarily pick a direction and wait until in it inevitably crashes then ask you question, people will trip over themselves providing solutions all while asking "why did you choose to do it this way?" or "everyone knows you supposed to do _____".

A:

So my question is how do I ask these foresight based questions? Sure I don't have a "problem" per se because I thought of my potential issues ahead of time and am trying to tailor my solution around them.

That's exactly what benchmarking is for. Don't ask people to try and predict from your descriptions which approach will be better. Benchmark your code and find out for sure.

