XML schema

Sorry for the cross-post, but I wasn't sure where this should go. I
have a large XML file (about 7.5Gb) that is composed of about 17
million individual records. I have successfully loaded these records
as individual XML records into a table with 17M rows. However, I
looked around a bit and noticed that there are at least a couple of
XML schemas that have been available in the past (but don't look like
they are currently maintained) that enable XPATH queries directly on
the schema. Is the current XML datatype (in 8.3) the direction of the
future, or is something more akin to a dedicated XML schema (I think
this is the route that Oracle has gone) going to be important?

Thanks,
Sean