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Roger, > 1. How you structure your information in XML has a tremendous impact > on the processing of the information. > > 2. Hierarchy makes processing information hard! There exists a > relationship between hierarchy of information and the complexity of > code to process the information. The relationship is roughly: the > greater the hierarchy, the greater the complexity of code to process > the information (Some hierarchy is good, of course. But the amount > of hierarchy that is good is probably much less than one might > imagine, certainly less than I thought, as described above.) > > 3. Flat data is good data! Flatten out the hierarchy of your data. > It makes the information flexible and easier to process. > > 4. Order hurts! Requiring a strict order of the information makes for > a brittle design. It is only when I allowed the lots and pickers to > occur in any order that the flexibility and simplicity kicked in. I think you have just rediscovered the usefulness of the relational model and normalization. There's a reason why RDBMS took over from hierarchical databases for this kind of information and processing. (This is not to say that there aren't linear/hierarchical documents that fit much better into an XML world than an RDBMS world.) -- Kian-Tat Lim, ktl@k..., UTF-7: +Z5de+pBU-
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