An XML document is indeed just a simple textfile, which can off course be read by any textreader, including a browser. In order to make a website out of a XML file you'll need to do XML transformations, using XSLT. With a XSLT document you can transform your XML document to a XHTML page, which can be processed by your browser for display. So to answer the three questions: 1. XML is a markup language. Meaning you can give a structural meaning to the contents. 2. As said XML documents cannot be executed, you will have to use XML transformations (using another transformations document) to transform your page to XHTML in order for your browser to understand it (but off course you could transform it to any sort of document). 3. XSLT transformations in Windows can be done by MSXML, that is already installed when you install Windows. Firefox uses its own, Transformiix. For Linux and OS X there are probably multiple libraries available. So basicly you probably already have what you need.
