Lost about what XHTML is for at this point

[Guest TGWDNGHN]

I'm a programmer, not a web developer, but occasionally I'd find myself making a few pages for myself in HTML. When I started reading about XML and XHTML, some things got me a bit confused...As a programmer, I love the idea of isolating the data (for display) apart from the structure and formatting of what is to be displayed. To my understanding... you can store the data in XML, and there are some XML tools that allow you to both transform it into (X?)HTML and format it accordingly. If you can transform and format XML to (X?)HTML, then what do you need plain XHTML for?I'm confused about the role in XHTML. If XHTML has no mechanisms to bind XML into the webpage, then why use it? (Maybe I'm wrong, but to say the least the unofficial <xml> tag for IE does not count)Like I said, I'm really confused... I mean if you had something that followed a specific format that stayed consistant throughout, I can see why you can use XML to organize all the data and format it accordingly. Even if you had an inconsistant webpage, why can't you just use XML & friends to do all the work for you? Where does XHTML come into play?I would seriously be thankful if someone pointed out what I'm overlooking entirely. Clearly I am missing the picture, and I'd appreciate it if someone pointed this out. Thanks

[Skemcin]

xml - organized data, sort of a portable text based databasexhtml - is really a more strict fromat of HTML, but for all intents and purposes, start by just thinking it is HTML.having said that:html - wraps text to enhance its appearance.So XML is fairly useless without XHTML (or HTML for that matter) because when viewing it you are looking at the raw data. Using a server side scripting language to parse the XML, you woudl then use XHTML (or HTML for that matter) to present the data you just got done parsing.XHTML/HTML is really powerless since it only gets processed on the client-side and it has (as you mentioned) no functionality. But it does serve a purpose - it makes things look good.

[boen_robot]

Or if I could put it more simply:XML- data.XSLT or any server side scripting language- data to structureXHTML- structureCSS- presentation