I liked the question and it didn't feel like a syntax parser. I believe all of the answers return results, but only one returns the result you really want, so I'm not checking syntax as much as leveraging my understanding of node depth and CROSS JOIN. Having some, but not a lot of experience in XML, I could see myself working through queries exactly like these trying to figure out how to worm what I wanted out of a piece of XML. It was nice to get the optimization and best practice notes here in the comments too since I don't get into XML frequently and never would have known how to optimize it.