Re: The State of Native XML databases

[Ronald Bourret]

Fair enough, but there are probably use cases in the integration world 
where this is not possible or very, very difficult, especially if you 
don't have control over the sources you are integrating.

For example, you might have Name elements in different parts of the 
document with different structures -- in one place, a Name might simply 
contain a person's name as a string; in another place, a Name might 
contain child elements describing the different parts of the name 
(Given, Family, etc.)

-- Ron

John Snelson wrote:
> I think a strong argument could be made that a criteria for being a well 
> designed XML document is the ability to tell an element's type from it's 
> name - or at least from the path to it. This is why I said XML /could 
> be/ self describing.
> 
> Of course, there are plenty of badly designed XML formats out there.