XML was completed in 1998 by the W3C. This paper focuses the attention on the issues of the XML-based Web publishing. First of all, the paper describes the essential primaries of the electronic documents, analyses the situation of the Web publishing, explore the difficulties and bottlenecks of HTML. Furthermore, based on the purposes of document access, integration, delivery, manipulation and display, the paper proposes a 3-tier distributed architecture for document management. Which maps the related technologies of XML family, such as DTD, XML Schema, XML Namespaces, RDF, XLink, DOM, CCS and XSL, etc., to the corresponding tiers. It also reflects that XML will plays an important role in the Web integration. If we say that the HTML was the first revolution of the Web, then the XML could be viewed as the second-generation. XML not only provides a new mechanism for data representation, but also has the potential to extend the Internet beyond information delivery to knowledge management. Expectably, XML will cut a generous swath across various application fields, such as electronic publishing, electronic commerce, electronic library, electronic data exchange, and distance learning, etc.