Newbie - advice asked

["Hewko, Doug" <Doug.Hewko@ccra-adrc.gc.ca>]

Hi!

I would like some advice on how to go about expanding my knowledge in XML. I
am playing around with a intranet site and hopefully can put it into
production some time. Very basic and it uses client-side XML. Our standard
platform is MS IE 5.5 without plug-ins, so I am quite limited. I did install
the new MSXML4 parser, but it only runs in side-by-side mode. Upgrading 10
000 computers to the new parser is pretty much an impossibility, so my
client-side XML will always have a limited audience.

My eventual goal is to have something that can be displayed as easily on a
Palm or cell phone as on a personal computer.

I just found out that one of my development servers supports ASP, so I can
try to create server-side XML code. I do not know what version of parsers
the servers use; I'm still trying to figure out how to test if I can have
server-side XML on them. (All I did was a simple ASP file to get the time,
and a ASP file to output an XML structure to my browser.)

My question is should I jump into ASP and use that for server-side XML,
should I download XALAN and use that, or should I try to get the MSXML4 to
work and use some of the cool XML features such as variables?