Guru's Guide to SQL Server™ Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML, The

Document Object Model

Thus far we've explored XML from the standpoint of generalizing document formats. But XML's real power comes into play when it is used to structure information.

All XML documents consist of nested sets of elements. Every document is wrapped in a root element, which in turn houses other elements. The structure is a natural tree—a tree of elements, objects that represent the content of the document. The DOM goes beyond the simple text stream approach and provides a language-neutral means of working with an XML document as a tree of objects.

This object-oriented access to XML documents opens the door to a whole host of other uses for XML. It makes it trivial to incorporate XML as an interprocess or interapplication data interchange ...