Chapter 8. XML and Data Binding

XML is all about storing data. It turns out that Internet Explorer supports a number of techniques to let you extract that data without needing any programming at all: You can use data binding. We'll see how that works in this chapter.

In the previous chapter, we took a look at working with XML documents in Internet Explorer using the DOM. In that chapter, we used methods such as firstChild , lastChild , lastSibling , and so on to work through a document. Using methods such as those give you complete access to the data in an XML document. Regarding an XML document as a node tree can be confusing, however, especially if you forget that the character data in an element is stored in its own node.

There's another way of handling XML documents in Internet Explorer, and it also bears exploration. Internet Explorer lets you read both HTML and XML documents and store them in a database. Using the database methods that we'll see in this chapter, you can move from record to record through your data in a way that many programmers find easier to use than the DOM methods.