Item 23. Reuse XHTML for Generic Narrative Content

Many XML applications are intended solely for machine processing. For instance, SOAP messages are almost never seen by a person. However, most DocBook documents are edited by hand and are intended to be formatted and presented to people. In machine-oriented documents, mixed content is uncommon and order tends not to matter much. In narrative documents meant for human eyes, mixed content is extremely common and order matters a great deal. However, there's also a common middle ground of documents that are mostly intended for machine processing but may contain some portion of text meant for people.

For example, consider a bank or credit card statement. Mostly it's just a list of transactions. However, ...

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