Inside XML

Using Data Source Objects

There are four data source objects in Internet Explorer: the Microsoft HTML (MSHTML) control, the tabular data control (TDC), the XML DSO, and XML data islands. (In fact, Internet Explorer also supports the relatively sophisticated Remote Data Service [RDS] DSO, which you use to connect to database applications, such as those that run in SQL-enabled application on a Web server.) Two of these DSOs, the XML DSO and XML data islands, support XML documents.

A DSO doesn't appear in a Web page (although, as we'll see at the end of the chapter, the XML DSO can display status messages in a page). You use a DSO to read a document and make its data available to the rest of the page. For a DSO to read data from a document, that ...