Applied XML Programming for Microsoft® .NET

Neither XML DOM nor SAX

The .NET Framework supports the XML DOM but not SAX. The XML DOM is the classic way to process XML documents, but it also turns out to be ineffective for certain classes of documents—mostly very large and volatile documents. The SAX model was developed to provide an alternative approach. The idea behind SAX is great; the actual programming model is much less ideal. SAX uses the push model, whereas a pull model is certainly more effective and flexible.

The .NET Framework provides a third parsing model based on the concept of the reader. The reader is a kind of read-only, forward-only cursor that doesn’t cache anything—it just reads as quickly as possible.

Programmers need classes that implement the XML DOM because the ...