Real World XML

The W3C DOM

The W3C DOM specifies a way of treating a document as a tree of nodes. In this model, every discrete data item is a node, and child elements or enclosed text become subnodes. Treating a document as a tree of nodes is one good way of handling XML documents (although there are others, as we'll see when we start working with Java): It makes it explicit which elements contain which other elements because the contained elements become subnodes (called child nodes) of the container nodes. Everything in a document becomes a node in this model—elements, element attributes, text, and so on. Here are the possible node types in the W3C DOM:

• Element

• Attribute

• Text

• CDATA section

• Entity reference

• Entity

• Processing instruction

• Comment

• Document

• Document type ...