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>There is a difference between XML as a standard and schemas as standards. There is nothing in VFP 7.0 that prevents compatibility with various applications and VFP 7.0 is fully XML and XSD schema compliant. Companies and products use XML and in particular specific schemas and there is no standard for selection the structure of the schema itself. So XML and XSD is a standard, but how developers/companies use XML is not a standard, just like there is no standard for how you create an object-oriented class library. If you need to reference an XML source that is not in the schema format for import for VFP7/SQLServer2000, you will need to map/transform that XML document into a new XML document that matches the required schema either using XSLT or some other methods. This is not exclusive to VFP7 or MS products, this is the way of the world with XML today and with schemas that exist and the fact anyone can create any schema structure without any standard structure in doing so.

I understand everything you are saying, but like others here, when an application says it can export XML and another application states it can read XML as a data import. Then us as general users/developers would hope that the XML would work. But it does not in some cases (most that I have tried). I know it will get better over time as XML becomes more recognized, but the whole thing in a nutshell is that just because the product says XML does not mean 100 percent workability between applications of different companies. What I was hoping to get rid of is this senario of getting data into another companies application:

You want my data?
OK how can I give it to you?
No that export method we can't do.
No we dont support that export method.
Well how about I give you a text delimted file and email you the Schema.
Then you could write your own conversion import routine.
Fine...


So you see XML is what could make this better, but it is not there yet.