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I’ve got an SQL table that I use to keep product data. Some products have other attached data to them (be it: books have number of pages, cover type; movies have their time-length; etc).
I could use a separate table in SQL to keep those, keeping (name, value) pairs.
I can also just keep an XML-packed data in a single field in a table. It’s not a normalized approach, but seems more-natural for me.
I did a similar thing in a shopping basket application. We needed to attach meta data to the products without creating too much of a schema, which would have restricted the format of the meta-data in the future. We kept the meta-data as XML.
The only reason I would not do it is if you’re going to end up performing queries on the data. Just make sure you won’t have some daft person wanting reports by Publisher meta-data or something (which has happened to me) and you should be fine.