Elliotte Rusty Harold on IBM’s XJ, a Java derivativethat builds in native support for XML:

It sounds interesting, but the tight coupling to schemas is a serious mistake. I want my XPaths and XML literals to work regardless of what the schema says. Indeed the schema agnosticity of both XML and XPath is one of their strengths. It’s disturbing how many people keep trying to force the schemaless genie back into the bottle.