Tim wrote:

...

<species_comments>The nature of <i>Carcinus maenas</i> is blah blah blah.</species_comments>

This is horrible mixed content stuff, and I am told that this is ipso facto, evil, and we will burn in hell for eternity for considering such a construct...

Except for this kind of usage. Mixed content is perfect for marking up free-form text. Bad for mapping data into data structures (in most cases a database).

If I had XML data containing this structure, I'd simply store the contents as the raw XML.

L.