Mike, very interesting. I've often found with my own clients that XML is being used to move data (effectively) from one database to another, and the databases are using "YYYYMMDD" as the date format, rather than the "YYYY-MM-DD" that W3C XML Schema allows. While the transformation is a straightforward one, dates occur a lot, and translating these dates for the XML is just an extra step that can introduce failures. It doesn't add anything of value. Being able to use the same data format as the database would be a big win for a lot of people, at least for their in-house XML. Cheers, Tony.