Applied SOAP: Implementing .NET XML Web Services

Identifying XML Elements Using XLink

As you gain experience with XML, you'll find that hierarchical relationships between data elements lend themselves to XML serialization rather naturally. XML is quite happy with a parent/child or sibling/sibling relationship between data elements. But what do you do if the data isn't hierarchical by nature?

A classic example of this is the linked list. The nodes in a linked list, by definition, have no hierarchical relationship. You could argue in favor of a sibling/sibling relationship, but recall that XML doesn't specify ordering of elements. To XML, this document arrangement

<element1/>
<element2/>

is semantically the same as this arrangement:

<element2/>
<element1 />

XML doesn't distinguish between ...