Am 20.11.2013 um 16:25 schrieb Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> I think it would be very interesting to see a survey of how deep XML
> documents go in the wild. Except for pathological cases, I think they
> would rarely go beyond 20 deep.

It really depends on the document type. I just looked at a document (Operating
Manual) from our CMS and it gives me 27 for
"max(//node()[not(node())]/count(ancestor::node()))":

* root element
* 14 levels for elements that control referencing modules from the CMS and
build hierarchy
* 5 levels for table structure
* 7 levels: module structure, block level and inline level elements.

Maybe those 14 levels could be seen as pathological but even by removing some
of those, there will still be 7 levels building hierarchy, which results in a
total of 20 levels. But I can easily see that some other customers are using
an even more specialized DTD/XSD which e.g. handles technical data at
additional levels. Or, if you have tables in tables it will give you another 5
levels

So, from my point of view 2030 levels seems like normal business.

- Michael

--
Michael M|ller-Hillebrand
mmh@xxxxxxxxx