.NET & XML

A Brief Introduction to the DOM Specification

The DOM architecture is divided into several modules. Although there is no real meaning to the term, a module of the DOM can be thought of simply as a group of related functionality. The modules as defined by the W3C DOM Working Group are:

DOM Core

DOM Core defines the actual tree-like object model you can use to navigate an XML document.

DOM XML

The XML DOM extends the DOM Core to deal with XML 1.0-specific features and requirements, such as entities, processing instructions, and character data sections.

DOM HTML

The HTML DOM extends the DOM Core to deal with HTML-specific requirements. These include the ability to identify a particular link in an HTML document.

DOM Events

This module enables you to access the DOM tree through mouse, keyboard, and HTML-specific events.

DOM Cascading Style Sheets

DOM CSS allows you to manipulate the formatting of documents through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), as well as manipulating the style sheets themselves. For information on CSS, see Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, by Eric A. Meyer (O’Reilly).

DOM Load and Save

Loading and saving documents is an integral part of XML work, and this is the part of the DOM that allows you to do so.

Document Editing

This module includes methods for manipulating a DOM tree while still maintaining its validity.

DOM XPath

DOM XPath includes a set of functions for querying a DOM tree using XPath 1.0 expressions. Although we will use some XPath features in this chapter, ...