Real World XML

Using Data Source Objects

There are four DSOs 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 applications 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 data must be formatted ...