Hardrive partitions

I'm looking at getting my first Mac, a Macbook, and had a question about Bootcamp and file sharing between OSX and XP. Can I split the hard drive into 3 partitions: OSX, XP and a shared data drive that both OSs can access? Would there be different/better options with Parallels instead of Bootcamp?

Im not sure about partitioning one HD, but here is an idea.

Maybe partition an internal HD for OS X and XP and have an external hard drive that both can access. I would use Bootcamp because of the better performance like accelerated graphics and such, although once The new OS X comes out you may have to upgrade.

Another thing to think about is that if you use the ext. HD then if you ever decide to repartition your int. HD then you wouldn't lose everything. Also, because of the ext. HD your files would be backed up from viruses if anything were to happen in the future. A little ease of mind.

I just installed Bootcamp and when I came to install XP I used the FAT32 filesystem.

FAT32 is accessable for both Mac and XP.
whereas you can only read NTFS whilst in Mac.