Chapter 9: XML and Ajax

In This Chapter

• Working with XML in JavaScript

• Navigating through XML documents

• Retrieving XML element data

• Retrieving XML element attribute data

• Validating downloaded XML data

As you may remember from Chapter 1, Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. This chapter is on the XML part of Ajax. Handling XML in a browser using JavaScript is far from intuitive, and this chapter covers the details-which you’re going to need to know if you download XML from the server.

JavaScript has some great XML-handling functions built in, but they’re not much use unless you know how to use them, and how XML is treated in the browser. But don’t worry: you’ll get the expertise you need here.