I have put together a proposal and some simple software for
handling genealogical data in XML. This takes the data model
of the well-established GEDCOM standard and represents it
with the encoding syntax of XML. The immediate benefit, I
hope, is that it becomes much easier to write applications
that process the data, because you don't have to worry about
the parsing, character encoding, etc.
Details on http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/gedml.html
All comments welcome, especially (from this group) on the
DTD design. But bear in mind that 100% object model
compatibility with GEDCOM was a key objective.
"Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's
mistakes".
Mike Kay