There's no ambiguity at all. Attributes are what fields are to a record; basically everything goes into attributes. Child elements are other records and are use

There's no ambiguity at all. Attributes are what fields are to a record; basically everything goes into attributes. Child elements are other records and are used when either there's more than one or their order is important or they also appear as children of other elements. Text is only used when there is actual content for humans that XML delineates; when XML is used as "application/xml" :) data there should be no text (unless parts of your data are such text).