Leigh wrote:

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.

This is how I would like to do business as well, but unfortunately once you do this in common databases, they lose access to all the useful structural stuff in there...

One day 'xml' might be a common database content type, up there with text, integers, real numbers, dates and the like, with real database facilities to manage and use this content... maybe it is already there... somewhere...

jim