XML for dummies!

[kiwi101]

Hi Guys,

Just looking for someone to point me in the right direction. My sons school has sent me his reports via email. The attachments are .xml files. I have tried everything to open them but each time it just looks like a html page and I cant read anything. Is there anything I can do to arrange the page and view it as it is meant to be viewed?
I have been to various Office sites and downloaded converters and updates. I'm using Office XP (word 2002).
When I click on the files from the attachments they open up in Internet Explorer (IE7). All looking like html.
Hope someone can help out.
Many thanks in anticipation.

[NogDog]

There are a few possibilities I can think of:

1. It's an XHTML file that should have had a .html suffix to make it accessible to everyone. If that's the case, try copying the file and changing it's file name suffix to ".html" instead of ".xml", then view it with your browser.

2. It is truly meant to be an XML file which use XSLT to display it as HTML. However, either the provided path to the XSL file for the formatting is incorrect, or you are not connected to the internet while viewing it in your browser, so your browser cannot connect to that XSL file, resulting in raw XML data instead.

3. They made a mistake by attaching that file, and either meant to attach something else or just plain screwed up.

[kiwi101]

Cheers for the reply. If I try to edit the file it opens in notepad. The first few lines read likle this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:

Does any of this help?

[NogDog]

Looks like it's a Microsoft Office 2003 XML file. If you have Office 2003 or later, you could try opening it up from MS Word and see what you get. If you don't have Office, you could download Open Office from www.OpenOffice.org and see what it does with it.