I do not disagree that they are the same, and I have no intent on treating them differently. However, your comment on some peice of software in the chain being broken caught my attention. On of the main uses I have for XML is actually XSLT transforms. In that code I have in the paste used blocks of data from a database that contain XML markup, in sort of an basic content management schema. What would your suggestion be for obtaining that content and inserting it into the XML document before it goes to the transfomer.