I think this is the narrow path where I see a better way. A lot of people talking about this kind of thing are saying "I need to be producing a product either for the data layer or for the presentation layer", which is probably true, but I'm not finding someone who's creating a data layer that integrates seamlessly into a separate presentation layer. I thought Google was going to do it with sites and their suite, but they always get so close to a complete product that it's infuriating. I thought atlassian could do it, but their wiki just bundles the two together. thegrid sounds interesting, but I think there's enough interest from management in a company that, if creating the site was easy enough, they would do it. So yeah, I think that's a little closer to what I want to pitch.separating the data layer from the presentation layer (the promise of COPE and XML) always requires you to go with a least-common-denominator implementation that is neither pleasant to read or use