you’re on your way 4
361
xml requests and responses
And now I can just use the DOM
to work with my XML, and send
over the DOM tree.
Look at the “Content-Type” request header on
the last page... it’s “text/xml”. That tells the
server that it can expect XML, but in a text
format. That’s not the same as a DOM tree.
In fact, there’s no easy way to send a DOM tree
to a web server. You’d basically have to write
code that parses the DOM tree in reverse; it
would need to take each node in the DOM tree
and write it out as text. That’s called serialization,
and it’s not an easy task.
And there’s the problem!
Hmm... that is starting to sound like a lot
of work. But I guess I could just create
XML as text, and send that, right?
After all the work you’ve done to learn how to
use the DOM, it seems sort of silly to go back
to text, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s pretty easy to
make a mistake writing XML manually; that’s
part of why the DOM is so powerful. It helps
keep you from making mistakes in your XML
document’s structure.
And besides, what exactly are you getting
out of all the extra work involved in sending
XML to a server instead of name/value pairs
using plain old text?
Why would you do that?