Jim,

> >Which happens to be the hand-made ranking (even by a vast number of
> >hands) :)
>
> Absolutely. But is there a database analog?

I have not found it yet. You too. I'm looking forward for comments by
other people.

> And what has this to do with XML? Surely we can't have a discussion
> of database semantics without a reference to XML?!!!

Which happens to be data _interchange_ format... What does it have to
do with databases, especially relational?

Regards,
Roman