Oracle 9i XML schema modification

[John]

I realize this may be too Oracle specific for this forum-- but I've
seen a fair amount of postings related to ORacle 9i's XML capabilites
so I thought I'd give it a shot.

So, I've read in Oracle's documentatino for 9iR2 that if you want to
store schema based XML documents in Oracle, you first have to register
the schema. The problem is that if you want to modify the schema, and
then subsequently re-register it Oracle will force you to drop the
existing schema and delete all of the objects/tables/data associated
with it. Ok, fair enough, I can see how it would be hard to support
the ability to make any change to an XML schema and have Oracle
automagically mirgate the data to the new format.

But what if I just want to make relatively simple changes-- like
adding an additional text attribute to the schema? Could I "get
around" this limitation by manually doing an alter type on the
underlying objects and then changing then carefully updating Oracle's
copy of the schema to be in synch w/ this new underlying attribute
(but not re-registering the schema)? I can't think of why not-- but
what are your thoughts on this?