Hi, I found SLiP some days ago. It is a shorthand syntax/editor for XML or XML-like data and the translator is written in python. Just search for it in the web. Hope it helps? Elena You wrote: The minidom won't quite do what I need. This particular project is a web-hosted XML editor, really a development front-end for another system. The ParsedXML product holds and manages the corpus of the material being edited... Now that I have a semi-working alpha-release it may be time to rethink the system and redesign for performance and simplicity. ParsedXM drags along a lot of mechanism that I do not need. In fact, my experience as been that XML and the DOM is not a great internal representation--better to parse the XML into a more maleable data structure, do what needs to be done, and reconstruct. Comments & suggestions most welcome. -d