Importing XML to a web page and using ID

I've been working on the web  display of the online database for DCS, starting from Luca's code, and then I shall put the backend from Satoru's on it. It seems the best way (most robust) to import XML into a web page is using an Ajax method and retrieve the .xml file. However I was surprised at first to find that the 'id' attribute didn't work with 'getElementById()', until I remembered that one of the few remaining places where a DTD is preferable over a W3C schema is in defining the id attribute to be of type 'ID'. Once done, it seems to work (tiddler article in preparation).

Today I need an XSLT to go from Luca's existing Atlas.xml file format to the new menu.xml format I made, which is less wordy and separates the menu definition from the hierarchy, using xlink:href references to bind the two.

On the back burner for now: On Monday, after reviewing a few web apps in Atlas which access Cool, it became apparent that everyone is doing their own ugly thing to get the COOL environment set up before accessing the database...better would be to have a centralized service. I'll accept the received wisdom that SOAP is too wordy, and now I've downloaded and locally installed CherryPy to expose the python interface to COOL via URLs.

Metadata: Atlas has it, but it seems that we have a homegrown solution; why aren't they using RDF?