reading txt into XUL

Okay.....I'm really new to XUL, but like what I see so far. So much so that I decided to completely redo a kiosk project. The difficulty I'm having is that the kiosk will only receive content updates every now and then through some commercial satellite software. This means the downloaded files will have continously changing file structure -- not my design -- a problem created by those who came before. I can use PHP/MySQL to create a text file or XML of the new structure as it updates, but it's unclear to me how to get XUL to dynamically read links (values) into the menubar items from a local file. I've got a lot of book and web references, but the examples of content are RDF (I'm not experienced enough and my initial trials failed). Is there a way to read in XML or basic text files? I guess what I'm looking to know is 1) if this is possible and 2) what keywords do I need to look for in reference manuals, etc.

Thanks in advance for the help.

You need to be thinking more in terms of Javascript as the data handler, and XUL as the end result of the data you are handling. One way is to just request a remote Javascript source file (the src="" attribute of a <script> tag pair). This remote source can contain directives as well as data, and by using methods such as createElement, appendChild and removeChild, you can restructure your XUL menus at will.

If you really want to get a handle on XUL, I recommend you get Rapid Application Development with Mozilla, which is probably the best single resource on XUL programming at the moment.

And, don't get too hung up on RDF. I have created a fairly large XUL-based application without using RDF once. Personally, I think RDF is a needlessly complicated data manipulation method and doesn't offer many positive benefits.