>For instance, when I look at the posted questions, sometimes I see very
>badly structured XML. Are those being really used in applications? If yes,
>then I am really worried.


define badly structured, I mean that I have my interpretation as to what
constitutes badly structured but it might not be the same as other peoples.
I tend to like a model of using xml as a document structure and importing
simple data structures into it.
when I'm working from a document-centric viewpoint then my markup can have
element -
 text()
  element -
 text() /element
 text()
/element

if I'm working from a data centric viewpoint then I would never allow more
than one text() as the child of an element. I've noticed that people seem to
prefer the data-centric model as being a better-structure, and I'm betting
this is what you feel also(hence your reference to the xml feed), I
certainly agree it's better for producing data representations like a list
of books, a table of books, and what have you, I don't think it's very good
for producing a book however.

aside from that there's the question of what to do with attributes/elements,
my opinion is that an attribute should describe metadata of a nodeset, so I
figure this is bad structure:
<address zipcode="84012">
<city>...</city>
<street>...</street>
<number>...</number>
</address>

whereas this is good structure
<address type="business">
<city>...</city>
<street>...</street>
<number>...</number>
<zipcode>...</zipcode>
</address>
but that's just a personal thing I suppose.

another interpretation of badly structured could involve the balance of
elements and attributes, some parsers, msxml 3 from some benchmarks I've
read, can have performance issues with markup that is too heavily weighted
towards either elements or attributes - the whys and wherefores of this I
don't know - thus <Someelement att1=".." att2=".." att3=".."/> repeated
throughout a document could be a bad structure. This points out something I
consider bad structure, i.e flat non-hierarchical files, I had to work on
one recently, the xml feed came from someone elses word program which I
think they just took the code from an example on msdn. truly for xslt flat
files [expletive deleted].
But sometimes customers give you flat files and you can't do other but solve
their problems for them.

but anyway that's my question: What's bad structure?





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