Laid out in an email all the factors which are pushing us towards the notion of a complete, coherent XHTML page including all its linked components. We'll make a final decision on this tomorrow. Meanwhile, after some discussion, I've switched to building the AJAX fragments directly from the standalone XML. I'm now handling most of the contents of these items, including lookups for corresp'ed person elements, but I'm not yet doing anything with dates, since that code is not yet written. That's to come.