okay, better all the time! (can't thank you enough for all this help).. the htmlText thing still isn't working though; on both your script and mine, if I change the .text to .htmlText the textarea stays blank. I have it set to "html=true" in the component parameters, but it will only display the output if I have the content set to .text.

Also, this is working great for displaying a title and text , but the xml I'm pulling from has a whole series of titles and text blocks, and I won't always know how many of them there are. Is there a way to construct a "for" loop or something to address that?

thanks again...