Hi Brian,

There is an emerging field of study called "XML Patterns", and a search of this exact phrase in Google will give you some idea of how broad this is becoming.

Here's a good URL from whence a number of such issues are analyzed and solved in quasi pattern language form.

http://www.xmlpatterns.com/patterns.shtml

In general I like to use attributes for things that are directly related to the "class" of element. Things like "type" and "id", among others. I prefer child elements for things that would be instance properties of that class.

< person type="customer" id="362551"/ >

< address type="home"/ >

>Under what circumstances is attribute-centric XML useful? Can someone give me an example?
>
>Thanks,
>bes