There is a lot of overhead involved in creating XML from data and the file sizes can be very large. On the plus side, VFP is an excellent XML client, it can be interpreted by most anything and can be transformed for presentation with XSL. It is also quickly becoming the standard for messaging (check out SOAP\ROPE).

ADO is an MS standard, and as far as I know, compatible only with MS products. If you want to work with client side cursors in web browsers and even VFP front ends through HTTP, RDS which is part of ADO, is very cool.

Charlie