Just dont learn VB.net, seriously. dont. i advise 100% against it.And i dont see how the fact that there are different branches of XML makes it the future. Once you learn basic syntax of RSS its pretty easy to figure out from there. once you get RDF and ATOM, again pretty easy. XSL is self explaintory in my book. I dont read tutorials, i read basic syntax and from there i figure it out myself. Do's and donts are easier to find when your browser is yelling at you becuase you messed up in the XSL somewhere rather than being babied by a book. I hate that, when people get books to try and learn something and then in real life when they try it they say "well this wasnt in my book so i dont know what to do" its to me like "if you need your book, you shouldnt be programming" And as for the W3C, they will try to fade out XML, but it wont work. I am not the only one who sees XML as pointless, im sure a very large population of the web programmers and developers agree with me(maybe not on this sight, but they are out there) and if W3C tries it, there will be an uproar in protest sites, mean things done to w3c's server, and so on and so on. They can try, but it wont happen. Possibly stricter XHTML, but XML will not completely absorb (X)HTML So restating what i told you earlier Tns, dotnlearn Vb.net. Its a waste of time and typing.