A method, system, and computer-readable code for a technique with which files encoded according to the Extensible Markup Language (XML) notation can be marked up to indicate that the content of the file (or some portion thereof) is dynamic in nature and is to be updated automatically to reflect changing information. The proposed technique provides a novel way to specify that a data repository should be accessed as the source of the updates. Techniques are defined for specifying that this data repository access occurs once, and for specifying that it occurs when a set of conditions are satisfied (which may include periodically repeating the data repository access and content update). In one aspect, the data repository is a database; in another aspect, the data repository is a file system. Preferably, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used as an access method when the data repository being accessed is a database storing an LDAP directory.