Some time back I wrote some notes on the theme of Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPAs) vs. bottom-up Tree Automata (TA) for XML. In general, both VPAs and TAs are great tools and the bottom line is that, depending on the case, sometimes VPAs come in handy and some other times, TAs do a better job. Representing XML schemas in the form of extended DTDs (EDTDs) using VPAs or TAs is theoretically the same. Both VPAs and TAs fully capture EDTDs, and furthermore the complexity of important decision problems (such as inclusion) for both VPAs and TAs is the same. However, a reason for possibly preferring VPAs over TAs for XML is that VPAs are often more natural and exponentially more succinct than TAs when it comes to "semi-formally" specify documents using pattern-based conditions on the global linear order of XML. If you would like to read more about this and other problems benefiting from the use of VPAs or TAs, you can read the following document, which comes with an example a