Ok, so it's text and it's a database, what's the big deal? well that alone
    is a big deal, you see back in the old days databases were a great tool for
    indexing information, but reading them and getting meaningfull reports
    out of them, well that was a specialised skill, then there was text files,
    they were great for storing information and easy to read and open, but that
    was it. then came XML it was just as easy to read as text, but it alowed
    data to be structured and so some of the database functions could run on it,
    ok so there is still things that only a well indexed and noralised database
    can do, but XML is a good compromise to bridge the gap.<br>
<br>
    consider the folowing XML snipet...<br>
<br>
    &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;<BR>
    &lt;parent&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;Parent_name&gt; Joe Blogs &lt;/Parent_name&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;child&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;name&gt; Joey jo jo Blogs Jr &lt;/name&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;/child&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;child&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;name&gt; Minie Blogs &lt;/name&gt;<BR>
    &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;/child&gt;<BR>

    &lt;/parent&gt;<BR>