Applied XML Programming for Microsoft® .NET

Embedding .NET Framework Components in Internet Explorer

The one key reason for creating data islands or, more generally, for embedding XML data in the folds of an HTML page is to cache data on the client to outfit some of the controls on the page. In the previous section, we saw how to embed a data island and how to retrieve its contents. Once retrieved, the XML data can be passed on to client-side components for further processing or can be manipulated via script. As you can imagine, the latter option is less effective because it is based on interpreted code and because, in general, script languages aren’t particularly rich in programming features.

So far, COM objects and Java classes have been the most popular technologies used by developers ...