Adam Bosworth Article - what does "direct access" mean?

Article entitiled "Speaking XML" by Adam Bosworth:
         http://www.fawcette.com/xmlmag/2002_12/magazine/columns/endtag/

I'm intrigued by "it is becoming increasingly necessary for developers to 
directly access and
manipulate XML documents."

My reading of the article suggests that "direct access" here means "lets 
make the XML a direct
serialization syntax for objects":

         import Customer
         Customer c = new Customer ("Customer.xml")

If this is the line of thought I'm fairly squarely against it for more 
reasons than I have time
to articulate at the moment. Just looking for opinions on my interpretation at
this point!

Sean


http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com