Tag Each Unit of Information
The key idea is that what's between two tags should be the minimum unit of text that can usefully be processed as a whole. It should not need to be further subdivided for the common use cases. An Amount element contains a complete amount and nothing else. The amount is a single thing, a whole unit of information, in this case a number. It does not have internal structure that any application is likely to care about.
Occasionally the question of what constitutes a unit may depend on where and how the data is used. For example, consider the Date element in the above Transaction element. It contains implicit markup based on the hyphen. It could instead be written like this:
<Date> <Year>2003<Year> <Month>12</Month> ...
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