An article in the most recent issue of Windows Developer, entitled "Parsing XML Files in .NET Using C#" and written by James McCaffrey, opens:
Parsing XML files is an unglamorous task that can be time consuming and tricky. In the days before .NET, programmers were forced to read XML as a text file line by line and then use string functions and possibly regular expressions.
Huh?
The article is an exploration of some of the ways to deal with XML. I agree - parsing XML is an unglamorous, tedious task. I also agree that .NET adds interesting ways to work with XML (XPathNavigator and DataSets, for example).
But I've worked with XML and XSLT for a long time, and I've never ever parsed XML by hand. Isn't that kind of the point?