XML and related W3C standards (XSLT, XML Schema, XPath, DOM, etc.) often take part in the linguistic data representation and interchange today but not as a direct way to implement efficient data manipulation software tools. The aim of the paper is to show that incorporation of XML and the standards that surround it can bring general applicability of the implemented system for various kinds of linguistic data and also easy extensibility of such systems. As a case study we present a designed and implemented system called DEB (Dictionary Editor and Browser) that is able to manage lexical data from dictionaries to lexical databases, semantic networks, and complex ontologies. The smart design also facilitates the connection to other linguistic tools such as corpus managers or morphological analysers.