How are those two examples different? Every XML system I've used would see those as the same.

I, however, really enjoyed this line from the link. "I once believed that it would be very beneficial for our long-term information needs to adorn the text with as much meta-information as possible. I still believe that the world would be far better off if it had evolved standardized syntactic notations for time, location, proper names, language, etc, and that even prose text would be written in such a way that precision in these matters would not be sacrificed, but most people are so obsessively concerned with their immediate personal needs that anything that could be beneficial on a much larger scale have no chance of surviving."

This wonderfully, succinctly explains why efforts like the semantic web are doomed to failure.