Section 6.6. Trees, trees, everywhere I look

6.6. Trees, trees, everywhere I look

You've already seen how the Document Object Model makes working with HTML easy. But the DOM is a lot more versatile: you can use it to work with XML documents as well. Let's check out how the XML returned from getUpdatedSales.php looks as a DOM tree:

 All the elements and text in ...show up in the DOM tree representation of the XML. the XML document... <?xml version="1.0"     encoding="utf-8"?> <totals>       totals boards-sold   boots-sold "1710"       "315"       "85"    bindings-sold  <boards-sold>1710</boards-sold>  <boots-sold>315</boots-sold>  <bindings-sold>85</bindings-sold> </totals> Each of the three "sold" elements has one child node: a text node with the number of that  product that's been saold. 

You may not have known...

       html    head          body title "Binary Tree Selection"        P P                        a             "." Below are our fine binary tree options:"         "Main Menu"         div             You can view other products in the em "depth-first" "breadth-first"    "trees are great for folks that are far away."  em                    "Our " " trees are a favorite for nearby neighbors." div 

• ...that just as the browser sees your HTML as a DOM tree, web browsers automatically convert any XML they have to deal with into DOM trees.

• ...that you can work with more than one DOM tree in the same JavaScript function. For example, you can read an XML DOM tree and update an HTML DOM tree, all at the same time.

• ...that HTML elements and XML elements are both just element nodes in the DOM. There's no difference between an XML type and an HTML type, at least when it comes to the DOM.

• ...that the responseXML property always returns a DOM document object, even if the XML in the DOM tree is only a single element, or just a single text node.