>I'm helping a third party design a DLL for our development team. I'm asking for an XML output stream from their DLL. I'll be cramming this into a string VARIABLE (not a file). I need to be able to tell what format an element is supposed to be. In other words, I need to know that

<NAME>Fred</NAME>

is a character 10 field.
>
> Isn't there a way to describe the elements' format INSIDE the XML stream?

You can either use a proprietary XML format that the client and server agree on, or you can use Schemas to provide typing that the parser will recognize (Node.NodeTypedValue will return a typed value). MSXML3 supports inline schema, so your data and meta-data can travel in the same document.