[thelist] XML as poor man's database?

[Tom Schmidt]

Novice here, so be gentle.
I am helping my wife start up a very small business, with an on-line presence.  She currently has a Weblog with some faithful readers, and I am attemtping to wrestle the weblog to do what I want to in order to provide the basics (images of product, shopping cart, etc. etc.).  I am choosing this for now since it is a poor man's choice.

I am in the process of customizing a page to display her products.  I *think*, since I don't have access to a server side database, that I can use an XML file to at least maintain information about the products I want to display (image file names & locations, descriptions, price, is it sold, and all that).  

I have the following concerns, however, and am hoping that I can get some feedback.

1) What risks am I taking in using XML?  Are there browser and browser version compatibility issues?
2) I am using JavaScript to load in the XML file (easy solution).  However I now have the same question as before, are there certain XML parser's that a user/customer may not have access to? 
3) I am concerned that for the small number of users who have Javascript disabled (is this really a small number?), nothing will work on my site.  Is there a non javascript backup solution for this other than hard-coding all the information in my HTML?
4) Assuming I can use XML with Javascript, the "ideal" solution would allow me to both read AND write information to my XML file.  I am not very hopeful the write front since file access is account/password protected.  Should I just ditch this idea, or are there other viable alternatives for me?

Thank you in advance for any insights you can give me.

TAS