I'm going to ask what may be an obvious question, but wouldn't it make sense for a serialization of a sequence to correspond on the output to the serialization on the input? That is to say, if you had a structure:
("foo",5,<bar><bat/></bar>,<!-- foo -->)
The main disadvantage of such a format is that it uses non-XML markup (parentheses and commas) which makes it difficult to parse using tools that are specialized to handling XML markup, for example XSLT and XQuery.Also, it doesn't solve the problem of retaining type annotations, for example the difference between the integer 5 and the positiveInteger 5.Regards,
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay