Summary

In this chapter you learned the following:

• The basic syntax of an XML document is a hierarchical tree structure containing a single root node, which contains zero or more child nodes. Every child node can have a child node tree of its own.

• XML tags are known as elements. Elements are marked as tags using < > characters where values for those tags are enclosed within a beginning and an ending tag: <country>Germany</country> .

• The XML DOM is the XML Document Object Model, the equivalent of the HTML DOM.

• The XML DOM can be used to access XML documents dynamically, and at run-time, regardless of the data content of those XML pages.

• The most important classes in the XML DOM are the Node class, the NodeList class, the Document class, the Element class, the Attr (attribute) class, and the Text class.

• Other classes that can sometimes be useful are the parseError class and the HTTPRequest class.

• XML documents can be generated from scratch, typically using a server-side scripting language such as ASP.

The intention of this chapter has been to introduce you to the XML DOM, not provide a detailed dissertation on the subject. To find out more about using the XML DOM there are numerous other available texts . To find out more about using the XML DOM, check out Beginning XML, Third Edition , by David Hunter, et al. (Wiley, 2004). The next chapter digs a little deeper into the basic tools and facets of XML by examining usage of eXtensible Style Sheets, or XSL.