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Comment by erlehmann_ | Hacker News Reader

It is rare in real-world XML that elements have children with the same type. Do you have a (non-divitis) example where the tags are all the same?

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It happens with any tree structure. E.g. I used to work on a system that managed reinsurance contracts and represented them as trees of contracts.

Did the elements often have immediate child elements that had immediate child elements (and so on) of the same type? Like:

  <contract><contract><contract><contract> […]

No, there were a couple of layers in that case. But that doesn't actually help you add a child at the correct level, because the end of a contract would look something like:

                ...
                </contract>
              </subcontracts>
            </content>          
          </contract>
        </subcontracts>
      </content>
    </contract>

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