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Yes, I am suggesting that the tree structure of XML is a problem for complex documents, because complex documents aren't trees - see the Patrick Durusau JITTs paper for a fuller discussion of this.
And yes, schemas allow the specification of some constraints on XML structures, but there are no standard XML schema languages that address the problems of modeling overlapping hierarchies (SGML with CONCUR comes closest).
Of course XML can be coerced into modeling sets or overlapping structures using techniques like milestone markup, but then the impedance mismatch between the structure being modeled and the underlying tree structure means that you're going hard against the grain when using the other XML technologies (XSLT etc.).
However, what I was trying to get at was that a solution is to reduce the problem where the "text" isn't modelled as a single instance, but as a set of instances (i.e. one per edition). However the processing solutions for that set then move mostly out of the XML/standards world and become application specific.
Thinking about it some more, it's possible there'd need to be some sort of abstract instance representing the 'plan' of a superset of all editions of any play, which editions are then synchronised with (using XPath/XPointer maybe)...
- Alex Brown.
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